Slet’s be clear: France and the entire European Union are deindustrializing and their citizens are becoming poorer. Industry handicapped by the cost of energy is losing competitiveness. Compared to the United States, Asia, India, the price of gas is four to five times higher, and electricity two to three times more expensive even though it is the key to our decarbonization,
It therefore seems obvious that we must control the price of our energy, particularly the price of electricity, the only energy that we can produce on our soil. Unfortunately, given the state of their energy projects, neither the European Union (EU) nor France will be able to sustainably lower the price of electricity or even prevent its increase.
The European dropout occurred with the post-Covid global economic recovery at the end of 2022 and the rise in gas prices. The war in Ukraine has only made it worse. The trend observed to increase the price of electricity over the past fifteen years is due to ubiquitous market operating rules and the implementation of subsidized and generally more expensive means of production.
It is paradoxical that, in such an essential area, decisions concerning the definition of the energy mix of States have been taken by ideology without a technical and economic impact study having been carried out.
A 100% increase in fifteen years
The opening of the electricity market in 2007 created a strange situation for Member States. With hindsight, consumers saw the price of electricity increase by more than 100%, while EDF’s finances were severely damaged. On the other hand, it has greatly benefited around a hundred alternative suppliers, most of whom have not invested in any means of production.
Under these conditions, claiming to create a single market across the entire European market based on competition between suppliers is a challenge. On the one hand, the means of production are very diversified from one country to another and, on the other hand, there is no massive storage technology available to cover the variability and hazards of solar production and wind turbine. However, electricity is a vital and strategic good, which must be available on demand.
It is therefore illusory to imagine a market governed by the rules of supply and demand, at relatively stable prices, as existed for electricity exchanges between States before the opening of the electricity market to competition. The reform of this “market” undertaken will not change anything.
ALSO READ Nuclear Europe: all the way back? With the current orientations of the energy policy of France and Europe, the price of electricity will remain very volatile, depending on the intermittency of EnRi (intermittent renewable energies) and the price of imported liquefied natural gas ( LNG) which will remain massively essential in Europe and inevitably expensive. Germany’s exit from nuclear power and the reduction in the share of nuclear power in Europe, strongly supported by the European Commission, despite the Euratom treaty, therefore remove both the prospects of decarbonization and those of economic recovery.
The German choice
Germany has ruled out nuclear power, for political reasons, to replace it with EnRi, wind and solar, combined with fossil fuels to make up for intermittent production. However, the optimal operation of EnRi is limited (the load factor of solar power is only 13%, that of onshore wind power is 23% and that of offshore wind power is 35%). It is therefore necessary to use controllable power plants to compensate for the variability of these productions.
In France, nuclear power is required to suddenly vary the production of its reactors, which is not without technical and financial consequences. It is this choice by Germany for its electricity mix (EnRi plus fossil fuels) that the EU seeks to impose on Member States which is the main cause of the increase in the price of electricity.
The rapid and massive development of EnRi is taking place without seeking a technical, financial and climatic optimum. This is all the more surprising as these EnRis are largely subsidized, benefit from priority access to the network, and from an obligation to purchase at a fixed price which can reach several times the average market price. While variations in production create permanent price instability, which oscillates between stratospheric levels (several thousand euros per megawatt hour) and negative amounts… where EnRi producers are paid not to produce and consumers are paid so as not to consume. In fine, It’s the consumer who pays for everything.
The cost of renewables: an unknown
The full and real price of electricity produced by EnRi and sent to the consumer is unknown, it is almost a taboo. However, EnRi requires considerable investments amounting to hundreds of billions of euros: connection, in particular of offshore wind power, storage and flexibility, new lines which are all the more numerous as production is spread over countless points. . Furthermore, with the rise of intermittent electricity production, the stability of the network, that is to say the security of supply, is increasingly undermined since at any time production must be equal to consumption. .
To compensate for this imbalance and intermittency, the development of energy storage and flexibility of consumption is announced. But for storage, affordable technologies and capabilities won’t be available for a long time. As for flexibility, it leads us to consider requiring consumers to adapt to variations in production. Suffice to say that with this revolution any industrial objective of competitiveness becomes illusory. Moreover, no serious study on the feasibility and possible cost of storage and flexibility has been conducted to date.
Due to the specificity of its more than 90% carbon-free electricity mix (nuclear and hydraulic) and its geographical location, France is particularly concerned by the choice of the European mix. Our electricity exports are far from covering the cost of the imposed choices, especially since Member States are not required to guarantee coverage of the intermittency of their production. To release their surplus wind and solar production or their insufficiency, or even their absence, States are counting on their neighbors by developing interconnections between States, and this, although the proliferation of wind regimes in Western Europe is proving insufficient and that photovoltaic production is only spread over two time zones.
200 billion by 2035: who will pay?
The cost of these new European interconnections will partly be added to that of the development of the national network which RTE and Enedis estimate at around 200 billion euros by 2035, or around three times more than the total cost announced for the first six EPR2! From the start of the development of EnRi, this situation of instability was predictable. RTE, network manager, has only just reported this in its report for the first six months of 2024 and its president expressed concern about it, on September 17, at the Renewable Energy Union conference.
With a growing share of EnRi in our mix, we can fear that with the new multi-annual energy programming (PPE3), as it is announced, and an unchanged European energy policy, production costs will increase and that transport costs do not explode, hampering the purchasing power of households and the competitiveness of our economy.
The decision to reduce the share of nuclear power (2012) and then to phase it out in the absence of renewal of the fleet was utopian, ignoring the laws of physics, except to aim for degrowth and another society. Fortunately, France changed course with the speech of the President of the Republic in Belfort, in February 2022, announcing the relaunch of our sector, our last asset to escape the energy and economic disaster. However, this recovery will be long and costly due to decades of errors and energy policy procrastination. We will have to stay the course of recovery in the face of criticism and impatience generally expressed by the same people who have so damaged the sector.
Recovery or decline?
To ensure the availability of carbon-free electricity, nuclear power must continue to cover the majority of our production, with the extension of the reactors operated for as long as the ASN authorizes it, new EPRs in sufficient numbers and, later, fuel breeder reactors (FBR), sustainable nuclear power which completely spares natural resources and largely resolves the waste issue. This fourth generation is that of Superphénix, when France was 20 years ahead, a lead destroyed by its political closure, in 1998, and by the stopping without debate of the Astrid project, in 2019.
The need to conduct technical and financial studies thus appears obvious and urgent in order to guide public authorities towards the optimal mix to achieve our climate objectives. These studies must be carried out without preconceptions, without excluding technologies or even the construction of a few peak and hyperpeak power plants using natural and then renewable gas, a taboo with which our German neighbors are not burdened. Without degrading our carbon footprint, this equipment would, however, allow greater electrification of uses. The Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Technologies and OPECST are particularly able to get involved in this essential mission.
Unless we aim, without saying so, at decline and impoverishment, such studies are necessary since, in the absence of a change of direction in our energy policy, the continued increase in the price of electricity will be inevitable despite heavy constraints imposed on consumers.
