Started earlier in November the strike movements called by several French grid operators (Enedis, RTE, EDF, GRDF) should continue in December and may have some consequences on wind & solar parks production.
Strikes actions are conducted on a national level and consist in decoupling the substation from the electrical network. This was for example the case in the Alpes de Haute Provence & Aube French départements on November 30th.
The main problem of such grid outage, apart from producers not being warned in advance, is their length. At Greensolver, some of the assets we operate remained disconnected for more than 8 hours. Moreover, it has to be noted that disconnections are usually abrupt and even after reconnection to the grid, some wind farm or solar park units were not able to restart, leading to unexpected repairs and expenses for asset owners. Production losses related to the substation decoupling are therefore increased.
Which actions are to be taken by electricity producers?
Remedies against strike actions are quite limited. Indeed, the grid operator is contractually entitled with a number of long cuts (more than 3 minutes) per year. This number of outage is usually around 6 per year, but can vary depending on the contract established between the grid operator & the producer. In the eventuality, during the annual network availability review, that number of disconnections is less than the contractual commitment, compensation is not to be provided by the grid operator.
From the information we have, some others protest decoupling have & should occur in December, as strikers did not obtain satisfaction.
In such cases, where strike movements are called on regular basis, the asset owner has to pay a careful attention to annual network availability reports provided by Enedis. After analysis, availability reports could help claiming compensations for wind & solar farms impacted by these kinds of disconnection from the grid.
