A further analysis of last Friday’s European near power blackout shows that the problem had begun already one day earlier in France, due to cold weather, says a German expert.

At wind energy protest group Vernunftkraft Bayern, Jörn Künzle provides background on what was behind Europe’s near blackout last Friday, January 8, 2021.

We recently reported on this here.

Disturbance began in France

Quoting energy expert Dr. Michael Schneeberger, “The disturbance in the European grid was triggered inFrance. Already on January 7, France’s RTE (Le Réseau de Transport de l’Électricité) was forced to take essential parts of the electricity-intensive industry off the power grid. The RED alert level was ordered for the entire network of France.”

Polar wave

The following reasons were decisive, according to Michael Schneeberger’s research:

1) The polar cold wave occurred earlier than meteorologically expected, with low temperatures for France.

2) Due to delays for new rules by the corona management, 13 nuclear power plants are currently not on the grid.

3) Despite fierce EDF warnings, the Macron government (German influence, Merkel/Greens) shut down the 2 Fessenheim units (both fully operational, i.e. almost 2 GW thus additionally missing).

4) CONSEQUENCE:  Therefore, beginning Thursday, power had to be imported massively at very high prices,
a) with continental high pressure situation, there is no wind (and this in whole Europe),
b) with an installed capacity of 57 GW wind energy, the available capacity was less than 1000 MW (as is well known, there is little sun even in January / ignored by politics).

5) So on January 8, the RTE called on the French population to switch off electrical devices, heaters and charging units, but that, however, was not continuously adhered to.

6) Therefore the only remaining possibility was to intervene using area-wide shutdowns or by lowering the mains voltage by approx. 5% (there has been no comparable situation in France in 60 years).

7) Germany was unable to offer any assistance, that was the trigger for a separation of the European grids by ENTSO for stability reasons.

8) It then took a good hour to stabilize the frequency again.

9) Southern Germany. Bavaria and Austria could be kept stable, thanks to the Czech Republic grid (the Temelin and Dukovany nuclear power plants were in full operation).

Note:
1) February 2021 is still to come, with even lower temperatures.
2) Also interesting is that Poland has requested Germany to restart the nuclear power plants immediately , otherwise electricity power supply would be massively at risk.

A similar incident occurred in November, 2006 when ten million households in Western Europe had to be disconnected from the power grid.

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NTZ Note:

On Saturday we posted on how wind and solar energies have been mostly AWOL over the past weeks in Germany. For the period from January 6 to 9, we see that Germany’s massive 110 GW of installed wind and solar capacity were delivering near nothing, thus straining the grid in these times of cold weather.

This article appeared on the NoTricksZone website at https://notrickszone.com/2021/01/12/europes-near-electricity-black-friday-was-triggered-in-france-due-to-polar-cold-wave/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=europes-near-electricity-black-friday-was-triggered-in-france-due-to-polar-cold-wave