For fear of power outages, the French government wants to temporarily ramp up old coal-fired power plants more than planned.

To this end, emission regulations that came into force at the turn of the year are to be relaxed.

Environment Minister Barbara Pompili initiated a corresponding amendment; it is now in the consultation process and is due to come into force at the end of January.

With the change request, the systems should be allowed to be connected to the grid for a total of 1000 hours in the cold winter months of January and February.

That is significantly more than the actually permitted 700 hours of operating time for the entire year.

Niklas Záboji

Business correspondent in Paris

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The hard coal-fired power station in Cordemais near Nantes and the coal-fired block of the Emile Huchet power station not far from Saarbrücken are affected.

With an output of 1.2 and 0.6 gigawatts, they can only produce a fraction as much electricity as the French nuclear power plants, which have a total output of around 61 gigawatts.

Due to maintenance work and technical difficulties, the nuclear power plants will only be able to access between 43 and 51 gigawatts in January, the network operator RTE forecast a few days ago.

“The lowest value ever achieved for the nuclear fleet at this time of year,” says RTE.

As a result, the network operator has increased its "vigilance" with regard to the power supply for January.

No supply bottlenecks so far

The planned ramp-up of the last two French coal-fired power plants is taking place in view of the impending bottlenecks. "This measure is necessary to ensure the security of the power supply with regard to RTE alarms," ​​writes Minister Pompili. At the same time, the schedule for the coal phase-out remains unchanged: the Emile Huchet power plant is expected to go offline at the end of March, with Cordemais to follow in 2024. The latter is operated by the French state-owned company EDF, the former by Gazel Energies, which is part of the Czech energy group EPH. The coal-fired power generation has already ended in Le Havre in northern France and in Gardanne in southern France.

It is still unclear whether recourse to the Cordemais and Emile Huchet power plants will really be necessary to maintain the electricity supply. On the one hand, that depends on the weather conditions. Since there was no cold spell at the turn of the year, the network operator RTE did not see any acute supply risks in its forecast from the end of December. That could change during the month. Many French people heat with electricity, the worst-case scenario is a combination of cold weather and calm. In France, wind turbines with a capacity of around 17 gigawatts are installed, but the capacity actually used is often significantly lower and was just under 2 gigawatts on Thursday afternoon, for example.

On the other hand, it remains to be seen when the French nuclear power plants that are currently shut down will go back online. This applies above all to the particularly powerful reactors at Chooz in the Ardennes. They were shut down shortly before Christmas after the operator EDF discovered cracks in the elbows of the safety injection system in the identical reactors at Civaux in the west of the country. Initial investigations indicated stress corrosion.

The reactors in Civaux are scheduled to go back into operation at the end of March and the end of April.

The re-commissioning of the reactors in Chooz was previously planned for the end of January.

On Thursday, however, the network operator RTE announced that the same problem had occurred in one of the two reactors as in Civaux.

He won't be able to go back online until the end of April.

It is still unclear whether this also applies to the second reactor in Chooz.

The investigations are ongoing there.