An American Geek in Paris — Chapter 3
Plugging-In
Perhaps you think that I’m going to talk this time about “plugging-in” to the French technology scene. While I hold certain grand ambitions of being able to speak intelligently about the French Tech sector, I don’t have enough data points yet. Instead what I’m going to focus on today is literally plugging-in. Electricity. Amps, watts, volts; you know, V = IR, the stuff that comes out of the wall and makes the lights go on.
Power Generation
As I mentioned in my previous post France boasts 58 nuclear power plants and over 7 GW of installed solar capacity. What I didn’t mention was the large and growing number of windmill sites that dot the French landscape. The French are installing enormous windmills both on and offshore although apparently not without a certain amount of protest. This is important because the nukes are going to start coming offline soon (2020). Somehow France doesn’t have nearly the amount of drama around nuclear waste as the US does but they are still working hard to figure out where to keep it for the next 100k years. The good news is that France doesn’t have a political party that is busy pandering to coal miners for a few electoral votes.
Finding Power
France got into electricity very early on: the 1878 Paris World’s Fair featured electric arc lighting along the Avenue and Place de l’Opera. That was 11 years before Eiffel came along with his tower. Unfortunately by the time that electricity became widely available in Paris, most of the buildings that make up downtown Paris had already been built. Out of stone.
In the US, and particularly in suburbia, most buildings post-date the electrical era and many are framed in wood that is covered in sheetrock. Hollow walls make it easy to run wiring anywhere and everywhere. Our kitchen back in Redwood City had outlets roughly every 3 feet which meant we could plug in about 22 blenders simultaneously (11 for margaritas, 11 for pisco sours).
Americans have many expectations about electricity: it’s always available, it’s pretty cheap, it’s relatively safe, it’s compatible, it’s available in multiple places in every room, if it’s out you need to check the circuit breaker box, and once you find the circuit breaker box it will be obvious which one you need to reset and how.
In France not all of these things are true.
When you travel to France as a tourist you normally don’t bring a lot of electrical hardware. A laptop, a phone, a shaver. Bring an adapter or two and you’re set.
When you actually move here though things get a bit more challenging. While packing back in the US we had to leave behind anything with an AC motor. France, like the rest of Europe, runs on 220V at 50hz. Any AC motor will get fried pretty quick as we learned when trying to use our vacuum sealer — to be fair, it wasn’t clear if it had a DC or AC motor.
When we moved into our apartment we discovered that wall sockets were quite scarce. Some rooms only have two. Total. Worse, each outlet typically only has a single socket. The Kitchen? A mere 3 outlets. But then the kitchen is so small that one can stand in the middle and reach all the outlets.
American plugs and sockets are very efficient. European plugs feel like they were designed by a non-technical committee of the EU Parliament. Firstly they are quite a bit bigger.
Secondly they have cylindrical prongs. The US style flat prongs are flat (excepting the ground prong) which is great for a large contact area and also to provide a lot of friction against popping out of the socket. Cylindrical prongs effectively minimize contact area and friction. Ungrounded plugs tend to pop out at the smallest jolt.
Thirdly, not all plugs are compatible with all sockets. The same marching band that designed the plugs also designed the sockets to have a ground pin that sticks out of the socket. If your plug doesn’t have matching hole then you have to stick in a little adapter which means you now have two low-conductivity, low-friction connections in series otherwise known as “la lampe qui ne marche pas.” It also means that in a country where every word has a gender there is no clearly male or female side of the connection.
Troubleshooting
Sooner or later a French apartment is going to blow a breaker. Our electrical panel is easily accessible right next to the front door. It’s the first thing that guests see when they come in: “Ah! Votre panneau électrique est magnifique!”
Inside it looks nothing like an American breaker-box. There are way too many breakers for starters because every wall socket is home-run wired to the breaker box. There seems to be no concept of a “circuit” with multiple outlets here.
Then there are extra, mysterious devices inside the breaker box with cryptic notations. Here‘s one:
This one has something to do with the hot water — I know this because I switched it once while trying to debug another problem and then we had no hot water the next day. I’m going to keep this picture handy as an example of how to completely obfuscate the function of a 3-pole switch.
I still have no idea what this other one is for but wow, that’s a lot of knobs and red danger zones. “Chaufferie” seems to refer to “heating.” In any case I’m glad I have a “General security device.” Hopefully this thing doesn’t ironically catch on fire.
Ventilation
One of the biggest consumers of power in industrialized nations is heating and cooling. A further consequence of stone buildings is that ventilation ducts and fans are rare. Most bathrooms don’t have fans at all although some will have some kind of miniature passive vent. You may want to consider these limitations before you order that choucroute garnie at lunch.
Where this has the biggest impact on daily life though is in my office building where, for much of the year, there is zero ventilation. In Silicon Valley, every tilt-up building in every industrial park has forced air heating, AC, and double-glazed, sealed windows. There are infamous battles, particularly between men and women, over thermostat settings but at least the air is always moving. The white noise generated by ventilation systems is a valley constant.
In older Parisian buildings, heat is provided via passive radiators. These are not only extremely electrically inefficient but they also don’t distribute heat well because there’s no circulation beyond convection. The heaters all get turned off in the spring but the office AC doesn’t get turned on at all except on really hot days. Put 8 people in a small conference room for an hour and it gets mighty humid, and sometimes a bit, shall we say, aromatique. At least you can open the windows but then the street noise can be deafening. I’m considering keeping a spare box of shirts at the office this summer.
Getting Outside
At some point you’re going to want to leave the building to get some real air. In Paris basically all buildings have electrically-controlled front doors. There’s always some kind of keypad on the outside of the building, sometimes with an intercom. Each building has a code which you need to remember to ask for when you’re visiting someone. The problem is that when you want to get out you almost always have to hit some kind of button next to the door that releases the solenoid in the door lock. Sometimes these buttons are conveniently labeled “porte” or even “press to exit” (in English!). When I was interviewing in Paris last fall I left one interview and got down to the lobby of the building. The door wouldn’t open by itself and no nearby buttons opened the door. Then the lobby lights went out. I hunted around that room for a good couple minutes trying to find the magic button. Turned out it was all the way across the lobby, a good 4 meters from the door, and indistinguishable from other light switches.
Safe to say that no such system could ever withstand a visit from an American fire inspector. Imagine trying to find one of those exit switches when the building is on fire, the hallway is full of smoke, and the lights have gone out. It’s fortunate that stone buildings don’t burn very well.
Electric Locomotion
In Silicon Valley you can hardly find a parking spot that isn’t between two Teslas. In Paris they are relatively rare but amazingly, some Tesla S sedans are being used as taxi cabs! I didn’t expect that. There are many other types of electric cars. While the US is all drill-baby-drill under the current administration, Paris will permit only electric cars as of 2030.
Electric bicycles are huge here, so are electric scooters, motorcycles, and even electric car sharing. All around town there are Autolib car-share charging stations where you can check out a small electric car that looks like the illegitimate child of a DeLorean and a Pontiac Aztec. It’s unclear whether it is capable of reaching 88 mph.
I’ve been reading about the ongoing electric scooter saga in San Francisco. Here there is no controversy, they are already everywhere, in every configuration. There are the futuristic self-balancing, single wheeled versions, the speedy two-wheeled folding ones (called trottinettes), and then basically electric Vespas. There are two electric motorcycle sharing companies, CityScoot and Coup, whose amazing bikes apparently never need recharging since I have yet to see one plugged in. Perhaps the battery fairies recharge them while we sleep?
One of the reasons the small electric scooters don’t generate too much controversy here is that one already encounters bicycles and even motorcycles on the sidewalk so a tiny electric scooter seems like an improvement really.
Then Again, Phone Jacks
As much fun as I’ve had with electricity here, I was completely unprepared for my first encounter with a French phone jack:
Oh well, who needs land lines anyway?
