Power outage plunges Paris into darkness.
As France prepares for planned blackouts due to the risk of winter supply shortages, an unexpected widespread power outage occurred across Paris on Thursday evening due to a transformer failure, affecting 125,000 households.
According to the report of the international group of the Tasnim news agency, citing the “Spiegel” weekly newspaper, due to the tense supply situation, France wants to investigate the controlled interruption of electricity. But shortly before this exercise, an unexpected event happened in the capital.
There was a massive power outage in Paris on Thursday evening. 125,000 households in the third, fourth and fifth arrondissements of the French capital were temporarily without electricity, according to the operator of the RTE network. The reason for this outage is the failure of the transformer.
On social media, residents shared images of entire streets in darkness. As France prepares for possible power outages in the harsh winter, central Paris mayor Ariel Ville joked that he didn’t expect the power to go out so quickly.
The power outage occurred on the eve of the exercise of the French institutions, in which a time-limited and regional outage of the power supply in an area was supposed to be simulated this Friday. As many of France’s nuclear power plants are currently undergoing maintenance, the country is expected to face severe supply bottlenecks in January.
Therefore, the government has started preparations for the plan to cut off local electricity at peak times. This government action to prevent blackout is not controlled. Today, Friday, shutdown processes are supposed to be simulated without actual execution. If necessary, this action must be announced one day in advance.
France has been suffering from severe power shortages for months. This is due to ongoing technical problems at several nuclear power plants in France. Corrosion damage was observed in more than 12 nuclear power plants. Therefore, for months, a large amount of electricity has been exported to France from neighboring European countries such as Germany. French power grid operator RTE recently warned that the amount of nuclear power available from mid-December to mid-February would be much lower than previously planned.
