Planned blackouts may leave the Swedish city of Malmo without electricity for days, according to experts. In France, authorities will notify the large stores of any power outages one day in advance

The French federation of supermarket chains has warned that significant quantities of fresh produce may be wasted due to insufficient refrigeration in the event of power outages the country may face this winter.

Franck Charton, general delegate of the French federation of supermarket chains, explained that companies are already preparing for power outages over the winter months. Although they should be notified of any planned outages in advance, at 9:30 pm the day before, the narrow time window makes it impossible for them to react, Mr Charton said. Shops will be forced to close during down, which could lead to a significant level of waste of fresh products, he told France Info.

„We have never experienced such a situation. Stores are very poorly equipped today with generators. We will not throw away frozen products that have for the most part more thermal inertia. On the other hand, in the case of fresh products that do not last for more than two hours, there will be a significant waste,” Mr Charton said.

French residents living in rural areas are much more likely to face power outages, according to Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne’s office. „Any scheduled outages should not affect more than four million customers simultaneously, for a period of two hours. In line with the prefectual orders, strategic facilities must be excluded from planned power cuts,” the prime minister’s office stated in a letter sent to prefects across the country.

As reported by V4NA, Xavier Piechaczyk, the president of the grid operator Reseau Transport d’Electricite (RTE), admitted last month that power cuts were likely during the winter months, even despite efforts to reduce overall consumption and the fact that winter isn’t particularly cold.

Besides France, power outages are also becoming increasingly likely in Sweden. According to experts, in the event of a major power outage in Malmo, the worst-case scenario would mean that residents will have to wait several days for the system to be restored. In order to operate the network safely during the winter, the system must undergo a manual shutdown of between 30 and 150 hours, which could have a devastating impact on in Malmo, experts say. This means that, according to a schedule, households’ and businesses’ electricity supply will be completely switched off for a certain amount of time. Incidentally, this type of emergency solution to avoid a complete „‘blackout” has never been applied in Sweden. Several experts and companies have warned that the consequences of a major shutdown would be intolerable.

In Malmo, for example, there is no possibility of a so-called island-mode operation, since the combined cycle power plant was decommissioned and sold after the approval of the Swedish Electric Energy Authority. Such a combined cycle power plant would have the ability to restart the city’s electricity system in island-mode, in the event of a power outage.

„The Oresund power plant was able to restart Malmo’s electrical network in the event of a power outage, and this was one of the reasons why we indicated its necessity in the energy reserve. Now, we have no adequate power sources to switch on the grid, which means we rely on electricity from power plants in the north. In the worst case, it may take hours or days for the system to start up again,” said Per Tryding, Vice-CEO of Malmo’s Chamber of Commerce and member of the Skane Energy Commission.