Intense heatwaves are leading to increasing numbers of blackouts in France and across Europe – so what’s being done to keep the lights (and the fridge) on as temperatures soar?
A blackout that struck the heart of Paris at the height of June’s heatwave was caused by high temperatures, according to supplier Enedis.
And the capital wasn’t the only place affected on June 23rd, as temperatures soared – outages were reported on the same day in Occitanie, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, and Centre-Val-de-Loire – leaving some 13,000 customers without power.
READ ALSO Paris blackout caused by heatwave, says network operator
The city of Tours, in western France, suffered two “successive and exceptional outages due to the heat” that left some 5,000 households without power.
And this is far from being solely a French problem – a particularly intense heatwave in Sicily in 2023 saw blackouts that lasted up to a week in some areas.
“Very high temperatures over several days with temperatures that do not drop at night cause the temperature of the tarmac to rise by several dozen degrees (on the surface), which put severe strain on the underground networks,” the French grid operator Enedis explained in a statement.
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So, these incidents weren’t isolated and were all linked to recognised climate change. The next question is: why hasn’t anything been done to mitigate the effects of climate change on a power network we’re all increasingly dependent on?
It’s the wrong question. Because Enedis has been undertaking a major modernisation programme to replace older cables that are vulnerable to high temperatures for the past 16 years, and make the entire national grid more resilient.
The city of Paris is in the middle of a massive project to replace its underground electricity cables with heat-resistant ones, after an emergency planning exercise designed to test the city’s readiness for the day the temperature hits 50C revealed a major risk of blackouts.
Since 2009, it has replaced 100km of underground cables annually in the French capital alone, with newer, more resilient ones capable of handling the high temperatures the city faces as a result of climate change.
Cables laid as late as the 1970s were conceived to resist temperatures up to 90C. But when heat is trapped for days under the asphalt, they can reach 120-130C, increasing the risk of failure.
These near 50-year-old cables are replaced with more robust modern ones that are better insulated and more able to withstand higher temperatures. As heatwaves become more frequent and more intense, urgency is understandable – but these things take time.
Already, however, the effects of the upgrades are being felt. “We are reducing the number of incidents by a factor of 33,” an Enedis spokesperson told Franceinfo.
Enedis plans to phase out the obsolete cables in all French cities by 2050.
And it is working with specialists to model the effect of climate change on different regions in France so it can target its €1 billion a year modernisation programme where, and how it is most needed.
In Brittany, north-western France, for example, wind is a bigger issue than heat. “So we need to have different resilience programmes for each part of the country,” Enedis said.
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Flagship projects in Indre-et-Loire and Ardèche, meanwhile, are seeing electricity cables buried underground to prevent outages caused by winds, snow and storms, which can lead to outages – due, for example, to branches or trees falling on to power lines.
Today, some 98.4 percent of new medium-voltage lines are buried – the higher cost of maintenance and repairs more than covered by the reduction in the number of outages caused by extreme weather.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
