Energy crisis: towards cuts in the mobile network this winter?

The Orange mobile network in France could be cut during the winter, warned its general manager Christel Heydemann this Wednesday, November 30. In the event of temporary and organized power cuts to deal with a possible shortage of electricity on the territory, the network of the French operator would be disrupted.

With the energy crisis, the possibility of "load shedding" this winter is indeed frequently mentioned: These are targeted and temporary cuts in supply intended to relieve the system in the event of excessive tension. The goal is to avoid the "black-out", that is to say the generalized and uncontrolled breakdown, in the event of tensions between supply and demand.

The electricity network operator RTE fueled this fear of the need for cuts, reporting in mid-November a "high" risk of tensions on the electricity system in January, due to the slower than expected restart of reactors EDF nuclear power plants. But it is only as a "very last resort" that load shedding could be carried out by Enedis at the request of RTE.

The director of Orange nevertheless warned of a danger, during a hearing before the Senate's Economic Affairs Committee: "If mobile services are switched off in a geographical area for two hours, there will be no access to emergency number services for a certain period of time,” she pleaded. A list of nearly 14,000 priority structures established in a judgment dating from 1990 should not be affected by these cuts. These are electricity production structures, hospitals, prisons or places of electricity production.

But the telecom networks are not a priority, even though mobile phones have become the main means of contacting the emergency services and the emergency number 112, lamented Christel Heydemann. "This is a subject on which Orange and the Telecom Federation have been alerting the government since the beginning of 2022," she said.

Backup systems such as generators or batteries would allow Orange to temporarily protect the activity of its sites in the event of power cuts. "Nevertheless, if load shedding increases, we do not know how the network will behave," she said, adding that "it is illusory to imagine putting batteries at the foot of each of the mobile sites in France", which are "tens of thousands".