French Power Crunch Is So Acute Carrefour Is Dimming the Lights
- Hourly power price settled near 3,000-euro maximum level
- Businesses and households are asked to curb power consumption
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French supermarkets are joining a national effort to curb the country’s electricity consumption, as cold weather and nuclear reactor outages pushed domestic power prices to a 13-year high.
Carrefour SA said it was cutting power consumption Monday morning, heeding calls from France’s grid operator RTE to households and industries to reduce usage in order to tackle a surge in demand coupled with nuclear outages and colder weather. As many as 25 of state-run utility Electricite de France SA’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline, just as overnight temperatures in most of the country are set to fall below freezing.