Daphne Psaledakis and Bate Feli of Reuters report that the French energy group Engie restarted its 1,000 megawatt (MW) capacity Tihange 1 nuclear reactor in Belgium on Monday, five days earlier than initially scheduled, a move that could ease Belgium’s tight electricity supply. The nuclear reactor, operated by Engie’s Belgian division Electrabel, had originally been scheduled to go on a planned maintenance outage from Oct. 20 until Nov. 29. The outage was brought forward to Oct. 13 through Nov. 17, as Belgium faced a tight supply situation with six out of its seven nuclear reactors offline.
Hellen Smeets, Engie Electrabel spokeswoman said Tihange 1 was restarted on Monday night and will be running at full power within 48 hours. She said Electrabel had been looking for ways to provide additional capacity to ease Belgium’s tight supply situation and one of these was to bring forward Tihange 1’s maintenance schedule. “We showed the results of the revision to the (Belgium’s nuclear regulator) FANC and they agreed that all the tasks were finished and that it was possible to restart a bit earlier than originally thought,” Smeets said.
A cold weather front is expected to move across central and western Europe by the end of the week, according to Refinitiv Eikon data. This could increase electricity demand for heating.
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