The State is ruining EDF… and the French: Emmanuel Macron wants to be elected “whatever the cost” – Boulevard Voltaire

The state has therefore decided. To keep the increase in the French energy bill below 4%, it is EDF that will have to put its hand in its pocket by increasing by 20% regulated access to historical nuclear electricity (ARENH). By selling to its alternative competitors an additional 20 TWh at cost price (€42/MWh), EDF, which could have sold this electricity at a high price on the wholesale market, will reduce its turnover by nearly 8 billion euros. The markets did not wait long to sanction the EDF title, which lost 16.5% during Friday’s session.

Very bad news for the electrician accumulating the tests for several weeks. Following the scheduled (for maintenance) and unscheduled (for breakdowns) closure of 15 GW of nuclear power, EDF must import between 10 and 15 GW every day at a high price. To try to limit damage and avoid running gas-fired power stations at full speed (the price of gas has become stratospheric), the government authorized the electrician to increase its coal-fired electricity production to 3 MW.

This operation praised by the government is however only a game of communicating vessels insofar as the State owns 84% ​​of the capital of EDF. Its loss of earnings is, by construction, a loss of earnings for the taxpayer. These 8 billion will be added to the government measures which, since September, had already cost the State a whopping 14.4 billion euros (600 million energy checks, 2 billion gas price freezes, 3, 8 billion for inflation compensation and 8 billion for the 4% limitation on the increase in electricity prices). In six months and quietly, the State has thus squandered expenses more than the cost of the Flamanville EPR, often presented as a national scandal.

Worthy of that engaged during the first confinement, the “whatever it takes” energy is replacing the “whatever it takes” sanitary. Except that it is, this time, a purely electoral measure. It aims in a crude way to gain time by making the candid citizen believe that this crisis energy is temporary and should miraculously stop… the evening of the second round of the presidential election. However, there is nothing.

The stratospheric increase in energy prices since the summer of 2021 (doubling of oil and coal prices, natural gas prices multiplied by 5, ton of carbon increased in one year from €32 to €82 and price of MWh electricity oscillating, at peak times, between 250 and 300 euros) has nothing to do with the economic situation. It is the result of a global structural break between a declining supply of oil and above all of gas due to a lack of investment in the exploration and development of new fields and a dizzyingly increasing demand (in Europe, but above all in China) to support renewables unable to supply the slightest MWh during the winter period. While prices may ease slightly in the spring and summer, they will rise inexorably next fall. The current situation unambiguously demonstrates that an inflationary period, similar to that which followed the oil shock of 1974, has begun.

Rather than cuddling the voter, the government could have played transparency vis-à-vis public opinion by proclaiming loud and clear that it was up to the French citizen and not the state to get their hands on the wallet. Electorally suicidal, some would say. Although the trick is crude, solving the problem in a roundabout way via direct and indirect subsidies, the majority trap the presidential debate by putting de facto the future President in a potentially explosive situation in the fall of 2022. A situation that could weigh down the new five-year term before… it has started.