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What's interesting is that they are now a net importer of electricity, but not much. But it's straining the European markets in an incredible way the whole year

What's interesting is that they are now a net importer of electricity, but not much. But it's straining the European markets in an incredible way the whole year. My guess, and totally not backed by evidence, is that a lot of countries like Italy etc. were extremely reliant on French electricity, and that they were basically using France subsidizing their nuclear plants and enjoying the deal, not needing to actually take care of their needs themselves. And now it's not there anymore. What's bad for France here is that nuclear plants basically need to run all the time to be even remotely economical - I read recently the EdF is losing billions and billions this year. Personally I think the situation is a lot worse then what they're admitting. They keep saying all year everything is fine, but then miss deadlines. The futures market was already going really high earlier in the year, but it affected the surrounding countries as well. Recently though it exploded in France only after they again pushed some deadlines back. Even Macron came out recently and said they need to remove roadblocks for renewables and be faster to give permits, which was a pretty big change in rhetoric compared to the usual "we'll build new nuclear plants". I think the next years are going to be renewables heavy in all of Europe, and people will be surprised how quickly things will change.

tatref 4y ago
EDF is losing money because of stupid decision like ARHEN that forces EDF to sell electricity at a low price, and also forces them to buy at a high price... So called electricity "providers" can sell electricity to customers without generating electricity in the first place, and also without transporting it. And at the same time, they get money from EDF through ARHEN!
- stefan_ 4y ago
  We have the same in Germany with hundreds of "electricity providers" that themselves own no infrastructure whatsoever, just resellers. As far as I can tell the scheme is to aggressively recruit customers with signup bonuses and more, profit from the wholesale market as long as the prices are in your favor, and should the market turn against you simply declare bankruptcy and start over with a new company.
  - b3orn 4y ago
    No we don't, those companies you're talking about are buying electricity on the market, they have no price guarantees by anyone, unlike in France.
venj 4y ago
EDF’s loss is due to the Arenh (Accès régulé à l’énergie nucléaire historique - regulated access to historical nuclear energy). This is a regulated market that was built to give a fixed price per GWH for new electricity companies. The goal was to allow new providers to enter the market before investing massive amount of money in new power plants. The idea was the following : -EDF provides 100TWH at a fixed price, to allow newcomers to enter the electricity market (which was a monopoly) - new companies would then invest in new power plants to reduce long-term costs. It did not work as expected: new power companies just bought cheap electricity and re-sold it without investing in their own plants. That worked OK for a few years. But this year, EDF had a perfect storm: - several nuclear reactors were taken down for a scheduled maintenance - corrosion issues were detected in several other reactors, bringing them down at the same time - the Ukraine war caused a massive increase in fossile electricity prices. So EDF still had to sell electricity at a low price as defined by the Arenh, but had to import electricity at a higher price to compensate for their unavailable reactors. This situation is completely absurd: EDF has to import electricity at high market price to sell it to a lower price through the arenh. We even see some companies benefiting from the Arenh that are suspected of stopping the B2C segment just to resell the electricity on the European market at a higher price. That’s why EDF is losing billions this year. Here is an article explaining the Arenh and its flaws in more details (before the war so quite outdated, sorry I couldn’t find more sources in English): https://www.magnuscmd.com/the-arenh-regulated-access-to-frances-historic-nuclear-energy/ https://www.magnuscmd.com/the-arenh-regulated-access-to-fran...
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  Don’t even bother explaining that it is a result of an explicit political decision aiming to force the nuclear power industry to subsidize the renewables from its profits. In the end, regardless of your efforts, people will use the losses the nuclear incurs to subsidize renewables as a proof that nuclear is uneconomical, and that renewables beat it handily and are the way to go.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    Wonder how much of this is related to the fact that France's energy minister have been MBA and political science graduates for quite some time. The previous one was Hollande's partner, so it's just another kind of nepotism[1]. Macron selling off France's nuclear infrastructure probably doesn't help either. Does anyone here have historical knowledge of Europe's glory days? Were there more actual scientists and engineers in key positions in Government in the 60s and 70s? For example in Germany Helmut Schmidt(74-82) had a plan for the future where Germany was to build out a fiber optic grid, which the subsequent Chancellor Kohl scrapped because did not like the influence of public TV services and wanted copper for cable TV to counter it[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ségolène_Royal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ségolène_Royal [2] https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehen-statt-glasfaserausbau/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
sfifs 4y ago
Europe basically needs to federalize and become a fiscal union like the US or India to stay powerful and get rid of these inefficiencies but are too divided by bad blood from about half a century ago and by vested interests of it's leadership class to do so. While many make the argument of diversity in cultures making union difficult, India has more diversity in culture and languages but has the advantage of almost half a century or so of concerted effort to unify the country pre and post independence - in contrast to the wars in Europe. So India is often able to plan and implement at a national level on some of these economic issues. The amount of development in the last quarter of a century has been nothing short of remarkable. Of course everyone else outside of Europe encourages divisions as a united nuclear armed Europe with over half a billion people in an advanced economy would become a powerful force and nobody has forgotten what colonization by Europe in Asia and Africa entailed. It remains to be seen if Europe residents will realise where there best interests lie.
- bruce511 4y ago
  I suspect language will be a key barrier in changing Europe from a Union to a single country. Language us a powerful factor in population dynamics (see Canada with English and French) and in Europe you'd be dealing with major language roots. English obviously, but also French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Polish and so on. I don't see much cohesion with so many languages, and no current country to give up language primacy. Using language to create an us-versus-them situation is easy, and I don't see this happy union-of-equals easily subscribing to a federated state concept.
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    It's not just language. There's also cultural differences, religious differebces, inter-cultural conflict, historical controversies and so on. There is a small spark of European identify slowly forming amongst younger generations, but it will take decades before anything like a federal union would even be feasable.
    - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Retric 4y ago
Oddly it went the other way. France nuclear was only exporting during low demand periods primarily nights and weekends, France needed to import during peak demand. Other countries benefited from lower demand for fuel, but needed to have excess capacity to support Frances peak demand.
drewm1980 4y ago
I want to believe that, but France has already recommissioned a coal fired plant. Falling back on coal will delay and exacerbate the pain of the energy transformation. I am an American at a young hip company in the EU and people here only pay lip service to the energy transition. People will keep declaring climate change someone else's problem until they are starving or freezing. If you are in the USA do NOT pin your hopes on the EU leading the way.
- WinstonSmith84 4y ago
  hydropower / geothermal is great but most countries don't have that. Instead, using wind turbines / solar panels have random energy production... Maybe fine in the Caribbean, but you can't power a country like France or Germany with that in winter when it's cloudy, un-windy and cold for many weeks, that's utopian at best. Hence coal fired power plant, instead of NPP.
- nmehner 4y ago
  https://energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart.htm?l=en&c=EU&stacking=stacked_grouped&chartColumnSorting=default&expansion=installation_decommission&year=-1 https://energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart.htm?... Please don't look at short term effects when trying to judge the energy transition. France might restart a coal plant because of issues with its nuclear plants. Germany restarts some coal plants to deal with the gas shortage and to export electricity to France. But this is short term. It is simply not possible to build new plants within one year to deal with the political changes. The long term trends are stable. With the transition to electric vehicles (https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/02/europe-electric-car-sales-report-13-6-of-new-cars-fully-electric/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/02/europe-electric-car-sal... ) fuel consumption should also soon start to fall in significant ways. Norway is already there with a decrease of 6.6% YoY (https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statistikk/sal-av-petroleumsprodukt https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statis... ), the rest of Europe is probably trailing by about 5 years. Of course everything should be faster and yes, the USA have to find their own way. It's not like even Spain and Sweden can have a similar approach to migrating to renewable energy.
WinstonSmith84 4y ago
> I think the next years are going to be renewables heavy in all of Europe Maybe, but hopefully not or then global outage must be expected when sun/wind goes down... Random energy production is no subsidy The problem is France, *not* nuclear, hopefully people understands this: (among) strictest quarantine in the world, no work for many months, social unrest and protests, bad planing ... there would be a lot to say to each of these points, but they all are responsible to the current situation we are seeing with NPP still in maintenance.
- locallost 4y ago
  I already heard this argument last year, that unpredictable wind and solar energy can work only because they are backed by French nuclear. This year has put a big question mark on that, and I think policy makers are willing to try because there is no realistic alternative in the short term. Even Britain is moving to remove the de facto ban on onshore wind, a push led by Tories of all people [1]. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/5b08507d-ae4b-47d1-afb7-ae851f98d6d8 https://www.ft.com/content/5b08507d-ae4b-47d1-afb7-ae851f98d...

tatref 4y ago

EDF is losing money because of stupid decision like ARHEN that forces EDF to sell electricity at a low price, and also forces them to buy at a high price... So called electricity "providers" can sell electricity to customers without generating electricity in the first place, and also without transporting it. And at the same time, they get money from EDF through ARHEN!

stefan_ 4y ago
We have the same in Germany with hundreds of "electricity providers" that themselves own no infrastructure whatsoever, just resellers. As far as I can tell the scheme is to aggressively recruit customers with signup bonuses and more, profit from the wholesale market as long as the prices are in your favor, and should the market turn against you simply declare bankruptcy and start over with a new company.
- b3orn 4y ago
  No we don't, those companies you're talking about are buying electricity on the market, they have no price guarantees by anyone, unlike in France.

venj 4y ago

EDF’s loss is due to the Arenh (Accès régulé à l’énergie nucléaire historique - regulated access to historical nuclear energy). This is a regulated market that was built to give a fixed price per GWH for new electricity companies. The goal was to allow new providers to enter the market before investing massive amount of money in new power plants. The idea was the following : -EDF provides 100TWH at a fixed price, to allow newcomers to enter the electricity market (which was a monopoly) - new companies would then invest in new power plants to reduce long-term costs. It did not work as expected: new power companies just bought cheap electricity and re-sold it without investing in their own plants. That worked OK for a few years. But this year, EDF had a perfect storm: - several nuclear reactors were taken down for a scheduled maintenance - corrosion issues were detected in several other reactors, bringing them down at the same time - the Ukraine war caused a massive increase in fossile electricity prices. So EDF still had to sell electricity at a low price as defined by the Arenh, but had to import electricity at a higher price to compensate for their unavailable reactors. This situation is completely absurd: EDF has to import electricity at high market price to sell it to a lower price through the arenh. We even see some companies benefiting from the Arenh that are suspected of stopping the B2C segment just to resell the electricity on the European market at a higher price. That’s why EDF is losing billions this year. Here is an article explaining the Arenh and its flaws in more details (before the war so quite outdated, sorry I couldn’t find more sources in English): https://www.magnuscmd.com/the-arenh-regulated-access-to-frances-historic-nuclear-energy/ https://www.magnuscmd.com/the-arenh-regulated-access-to-fran...

xyzzyz 4y ago
Don’t even bother explaining that it is a result of an explicit political decision aiming to force the nuclear power industry to subsidize the renewables from its profits. In the end, regardless of your efforts, people will use the losses the nuclear incurs to subsidize renewables as a proof that nuclear is uneconomical, and that renewables beat it handily and are the way to go.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  Wonder how much of this is related to the fact that France's energy minister have been MBA and political science graduates for quite some time. The previous one was Hollande's partner, so it's just another kind of nepotism[1]. Macron selling off France's nuclear infrastructure probably doesn't help either. Does anyone here have historical knowledge of Europe's glory days? Were there more actual scientists and engineers in key positions in Government in the 60s and 70s? For example in Germany Helmut Schmidt(74-82) had a plan for the future where Germany was to build out a fiber optic grid, which the subsequent Chancellor Kohl scrapped because did not like the influence of public TV services and wanted copper for cable TV to counter it[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ségolène_Royal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ségolène_Royal [2] https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehen-statt-glasfaserausbau/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...

sfifs 4y ago

Europe basically needs to federalize and become a fiscal union like the US or India to stay powerful and get rid of these inefficiencies but are too divided by bad blood from about half a century ago and by vested interests of it's leadership class to do so. While many make the argument of diversity in cultures making union difficult, India has more diversity in culture and languages but has the advantage of almost half a century or so of concerted effort to unify the country pre and post independence - in contrast to the wars in Europe. So India is often able to plan and implement at a national level on some of these economic issues. The amount of development in the last quarter of a century has been nothing short of remarkable. Of course everyone else outside of Europe encourages divisions as a united nuclear armed Europe with over half a billion people in an advanced economy would become a powerful force and nobody has forgotten what colonization by Europe in Asia and Africa entailed. It remains to be seen if Europe residents will realise where there best interests lie.

bruce511 4y ago
I suspect language will be a key barrier in changing Europe from a Union to a single country. Language us a powerful factor in population dynamics (see Canada with English and French) and in Europe you'd be dealing with major language roots. English obviously, but also French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Polish and so on. I don't see much cohesion with so many languages, and no current country to give up language primacy. Using language to create an us-versus-them situation is easy, and I don't see this happy union-of-equals easily subscribing to a federated state concept.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  It's not just language. There's also cultural differences, religious differebces, inter-cultural conflict, historical controversies and so on. There is a small spark of European identify slowly forming amongst younger generations, but it will take decades before anything like a federal union would even be feasable.
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Retric 4y ago

Oddly it went the other way. France nuclear was only exporting during low demand periods primarily nights and weekends, France needed to import during peak demand. Other countries benefited from lower demand for fuel, but needed to have excess capacity to support Frances peak demand.

drewm1980 4y ago

I want to believe that, but France has already recommissioned a coal fired plant. Falling back on coal will delay and exacerbate the pain of the energy transformation. I am an American at a young hip company in the EU and people here only pay lip service to the energy transition. People will keep declaring climate change someone else's problem until they are starving or freezing. If you are in the USA do NOT pin your hopes on the EU leading the way.

WinstonSmith84 4y ago
hydropower / geothermal is great but most countries don't have that. Instead, using wind turbines / solar panels have random energy production... Maybe fine in the Caribbean, but you can't power a country like France or Germany with that in winter when it's cloudy, un-windy and cold for many weeks, that's utopian at best. Hence coal fired power plant, instead of NPP.
nmehner 4y ago
https://energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart.htm?l=en&c=EU&stacking=stacked_grouped&chartColumnSorting=default&expansion=installation_decommission&year=-1 https://energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart.htm?... Please don't look at short term effects when trying to judge the energy transition. France might restart a coal plant because of issues with its nuclear plants. Germany restarts some coal plants to deal with the gas shortage and to export electricity to France. But this is short term. It is simply not possible to build new plants within one year to deal with the political changes. The long term trends are stable. With the transition to electric vehicles (https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/02/europe-electric-car-sales-report-13-6-of-new-cars-fully-electric/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/02/europe-electric-car-sal... ) fuel consumption should also soon start to fall in significant ways. Norway is already there with a decrease of 6.6% YoY (https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statistikk/sal-av-petroleumsprodukt https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statis... ), the rest of Europe is probably trailing by about 5 years. Of course everything should be faster and yes, the USA have to find their own way. It's not like even Spain and Sweden can have a similar approach to migrating to renewable energy.

WinstonSmith84 4y ago

> I think the next years are going to be renewables heavy in all of Europe Maybe, but hopefully not or then global outage must be expected when sun/wind goes down... Random energy production is no subsidy The problem is France, *not* nuclear, hopefully people understands this: (among) strictest quarantine in the world, no work for many months, social unrest and protests, bad planing ... there would be a lot to say to each of these points, but they all are responsible to the current situation we are seeing with NPP still in maintenance.

locallost 4y ago
I already heard this argument last year, that unpredictable wind and solar energy can work only because they are backed by French nuclear. This year has put a big question mark on that, and I think policy makers are willing to try because there is no realistic alternative in the short term. Even Britain is moving to remove the de facto ban on onshore wind, a push led by Tories of all people [1]. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/5b08507d-ae4b-47d1-afb7-ae851f98d6d8 https://www.ft.com/content/5b08507d-ae4b-47d1-afb7-ae851f98d...