17 out of 56 reactors are shut down at the start of the week, three more than last week.
The French nuclear fleet is slackening. This week, 17 out of 56 reactors are shut down, compared to 14 last week. And the trend is not expected to improve as EDF plans to carry out long-term maintenance from the spring, resulting in the shutdown of new reactors. In the summer, the bar of 20 extinguished reactors will already be exceeded, which will force France to buy electricity abroad.
On the side of the dams, the filling rate amounts to 51% this week, slightly below the usual averages. If the situation is not yet worrying, the lack of rain (more than 32 days without rain, historic record) might pose a real problem in the weeks to come.
The risk of tensions on the electricity network for the rest of the winter has nevertheless gone from “medium” to “low”, according to the manager of the high and very high voltage network RTE, which further removes the risk of power cuts in France. “The mid-February update for the end of winter confirms the diagnosis of recent months: the risk relating to the security of electricity supply has now been largely eliminated,” RTE estimated last week.
Gas stocks filled to 46%
No particular difficulty on gas stocks, filled to 46%. “We were able to spend this winter in satisfactory conditions”, explained last week the boss of Engie, Catherine MacGregor to the Figaro.
She also believes that “we will succeed” in “spending next winter”, from 2023 to 2024, specifying that this “does not mean that we must relax our efforts because the Russian volumes have indeed been removed from the global gas production, so we will have to continue to be careful”.