This had been expected for several months, but RTE confirmed it this Monday January 20. According to the network manager, electricity production in France returned to its pre-Covid levels in 2024 (+ 8.45% compared to 2023). And thanks to “rapid recovery” nuclear power and the exceptional performance of renewable production, it crossed the threshold of 95% low-carbon electricity for the first time and broke its export record.
With 536.5 TWh, French electricity production reached “its highest level in five years”, thus finding “a level identical to that of 2019, in line with the 2014-2019 average (537.5 TWh)”, according to these figures. The dark year of nuclear power in 2022, which had seen historically low production for thirty years (279 TWh) – due in particular to corrosion problems – is behind France, with 361.7 TWh last year. A return which illustrates a more general movement, affirms the International Energy Agency in its latest report, which estimates that “nuclear power is at the dawn of a new era”.
But if the atom remains, by far, the first source of production (67.41%), renewable energies have also taken their share (27.6%). RTE is delighted to“exceptional hydraulic production”, at the highest since 2013 (74.7 TWh) while rainfall records were reached in certain places in France but also a “sustained growth in production from the wind and solar sectors (70 TWh in 2024, compared to 46 TWh in 2019)”. Here again, this is a first, underlines RTE: renewable production “reached a record 148 TWh”, of which around a third came from wind power (46.6 TWh).
Carbon intensity of French electricity among “the lowest in the world”
Conversely, with 19.9 TWh, France no longer produced so little electricity from fossil power plants (gas, coal, fuel oil) “since the early 1950s”, representative “for the first time”, a cumulative level lower than solar production (23.3 TWh). France, which plans to abandon its coal-fired power plants in 2027, produced 0.7 TWh of electricity from this highly polluting fuel which emits greenhouse gases, 1.8 TWh from fuel oil and 17 .4 TWh in gas power plants, less than in 2023 (29.2 TWh).
-Nuclear which is returning to a high level, renewables which are exploding, fossils at their lowest… Logically, French low-carbon production has thus “reached the threshold of 95 for the first time % of electricity produced in France”, against 92.2% in 2023, specifies RTE, which had made this alliance between these zero-emission sources pillars of its energy future for 2035 then 2050.
According to the network manager, the carbon intensity of French electricity production was 21.3 grams of CO2 equivalent per kWh, almost a third less than in 2023. “It is one of the lowest in the world, indicated RTE. These performances confirm the asset that the French electricity system constitutes for the decarbonization of the French economy in the broad sense (which still depends at 60 % of fossil and imported energies) and its reindustrialization.”
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