This is a record that we would not like to know, and yet it has affected more than thousands and thousands of French households in 2023. The milestone of one million interventions precisely for unpaid energy bills, including more than a quarter resulted in cuts, the national energy mediator said this Friday.
That is an increase in interventions of 3% compared to the previous year and even 49% compared to 2019. This is the highest level since this independent public authority recorded them, in 2015. Increasingly, suppliers are resorting to electrical power limitations rather than firm cuts, due to a change in the practices of some of them but also in regulations.
Too many cuts again
However, these approximately 1,000,908 interventions last year still gave rise to 178,000 electricity cuts and nearly 87,300 gas cuts, notes Olivier Challan Belval, the national energy mediator whose mission is to propose amicable solutions to disputes with companies in the sector.
In his press release, he again asks for “minimum access to electricity”, which consists of “prohibiting electricity cuts for unpaid bills, for everyone, all year round, and replacing them with a limitation of the power of the electricity meter”. As a reminder, cuts are currently only prohibited during the winter break, between November 1 and March 31. Since February 2023, new regulations require that outside of the winter break and in the event of unpaid bills, suppliers request, for beneficiaries of the energy check or the housing solidarity fund, a limitation of power prior to the cut-off or upon termination.