Electricity: in the event of a power cut this winter, it will be impossible to contact the emergency services

Baptiste Morin, edited by Romain Rouillard 06:12, November 23, 2022

This is an unprecedented and rather distressing situation that France could face this winter.

While the RTE electricity network manager warned of a risk of load shedding and power cuts in January, Europe 1 reveals to you this Wednesday that the emergency services will not be preserved.

In the event of an outage, the fire brigade, the Samu or the police will no longer be reachable. 

In the memory of telecom employees, the subject has never been so sensitive.

To operate, the 60,000 relay antennas spread over the territory need electricity and if some are equipped with backup batteries, their autonomy does not exceed half an hour while load shedding could last two hours.

To ensure the autonomous operation of each antenna during this period of time, it would be necessary to install a ton of material per foot.

Logistics impossible to implement.

Operators alerted in February 2022

In the case of load shedding, RTE decrees the power that the network is no longer able to assume.

It is then Enedis that is responsible for targeting power cuts in areas of around 100,000 inhabitants.

In this case, the relay antennas can pay the price.

"In some cases, we can find communication breakdowns in certain geographical areas", concedes Olivier Loriot, director of Enedis in Center-Val-de-Loire.

Especially since the antennas do not reconnect automatically.

In at least one out of two cases, their restart requires human intervention.

>>

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Consequently, the operators have been insisting for months with the State services that the relay antennas be decreed priority sites.

Professionals in the sector have raised alarm since February 2022, but the executive has apparently been slow to act and take up the subject.

To date, he has still not agreed to protect the telephone network.

It should be noted, however, that this is distributed in a diffuse manner over the territory, which complicates the situation.

The prefects could act at the request of the State

The list of priority sites is governed by an order dating back to July 5, 1990. It includes hospitals, prisons, public lighting and even military sites.

The telephone network is not one of them.

However, over the past 32 years, mobile phones have become the first means for the French to contact the emergency services.

The prefects can however add sites to the list but must not exceed the threshold of non-shedding power, in this case 38% of the electrical power of the department.

A threshold yet regularly reached.

Possible winter power cuts could therefore have serious consequences.