App prompts customers to save electricity – expert gives the all-clear due to blackout
Created: 07.12.2022, 20:30
By: Kathrin Reikowski
Heating is so expensive that many people have big problems.
Now electricity prices are also rising sharply © Michael Schick
Blackout danger in Baden-Württemberg?
The fact that an app asked to save electricity was due to technical reasons.
Stuttgart (Baden-Württemberg) - "Please help!" An app on the cell phone, according to
Welt
, apparently asked electricity customers in Baden-Württemberg on Wednesday afternoon.
The mobile phone program "StromGedacht" from the network operator TransnetBW has reported.
It initially switched from green to yellow on Wednesday morning to urge customers to consume electricity now rather than later.
Recharge batteries, run power-intensive devices - all of this can be done before 2 p.m.
From 2 p.m., the app would then jump to red - indicating that power consumption should be reduced.
Customers should save electricity for one hour.
The operator spoke of a "tense situation in the power grid".
Electricity warning in Baden-Württemberg: Fear of blackout fueled
The evening after the Welt
article was published, a heated debate broke out
on Twitter as to whether Germany was threatened with a blackout or not.
However , Karsten Wiedemann, energy expert and journalist at the industry magazine
energate.de,
gave the all-clear:
“
From 2 p.m. there was neither a power problem nor the risk of a blackout.
90 percent of the tweets are fake news.
It was just (sic) about reducing redispatch costs,” he wrote.
And: According to Welt
, the “StromGedacht” app
has only been around for a few weeks.
Only since then can customers be informed quickly about an impending power shortage.
Network operator warns of "tense situation in the network" - this is not an imminent blackout
The network operator gave the all-clear as early as the afternoon: there would be no power outage.
Already in the morning it was recognized that there could be bottlenecks and it was therefore planned in advance that electricity would have to be imported from Switzerland temporarily - between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m.
The background is that at certain times more electricity is generated by wind turbines in the north than by coal-fired power plants in the south.
The imbalance must be compensated for by a so-called redispatch.
"With redispatch, generation is normally curtailed in the north and offset by additional generation in the south," a company spokeswoman
said
.
But because reserve power plants were not available in the company's own grid, this balancing had to take place today with the help of electricity from Switzerland: "Triggers are insufficient transport capacities in the electricity transmission grid." A blackout is spoken of when several regions experience a power failure over a longer period of time are affected.
(cat)
