⚡️ France produces the cheapest electricity in Europe. And yet the French pay for it more and more dearly. How is this possible? ⚡️
29 May 2026
Michelin has just announced the elimination of 1,500 jobs in France, partly because of the cost of energy. This is not an economic inevitability. It is the result of precise political choices. Here they are, sourced.
Let us begin with the fundamental absurdity.
France has the most decarbonised nuclear fleet and one of the cheapest in the Western world. The full production cost of French nuclear is estimated by the Energy Regulation Commission at between 55 and 63 euros per megawatt-hour. Source: CRE, 2025. Logically, the French should benefit from electricity among the cheapest on the continent.
🚨The opposite is what happens. And the cause has a name: the European electricity market.
On this market, the price of electricity is not set by your national production cost. It is aligned on the cost of the last power plant called upon to balance the European grid, that is to say, most often a German gas plant. This is the principle of "marginal cost". Result: when Russian gas soared after the invasion of Ukraine, the price of French electricity — although produced by nuclear plants amortised long ago — exploded in the same proportions. We pay for our nuclear electricity at the price of German gas.
⚡️Our energy sovereignty, patiently built since the 1970s, has been dissolved in a market that aligns our prices on those of countries that made the opposite choice to ours.
Then comes the second scandal: the ARENH.
For fourteen years, from 2011 to the end of 2025, the State imposed on EDF, through the so-called Regulated Access to Historic Nuclear Electricity mechanism, the obligation to sell up to 100 terawatt-hours of its nuclear production to its own competitors, at a rate of 42 euros per megawatt-hour. Source: CRE, NOME law.
Read carefully. EDF was forced to sell its electricity, at 42 euros, to alternative suppliers that own no power plant, produce nothing, invest nothing, and content themselves with reselling it with a margin. While EDF's real production cost was estimated at between 55 and 63 euros. In other words, the State forced its public enterprise to directly subsidise its private competitors, at a loss, for fourteen years. The cost of this mechanism for EDF is estimated at more than 8 billion euros. Source: CRE.
⛈️Intermediaries that produce nothing, fattened by a legal obligation imposed on the national operator to sell them, at a loss, the fruit of its industrial tool. This is what was called "introducing competition".
And as if that were not enough, comes the third episode: the failed renationalisation.
Yesterday, 28 May 2026, the Court of Auditors published a scathing report on the 100% renationalisation of EDF decided in 2022. The verdict is cutting. The operation cost 9.7 billion euros to raise the State's stake from 84% to 100%. And the Court concludes: "neither the imperatives of energy sovereignty and independence, nor the group's financing needs, required a 100% holding". Source: Court of Auditors, 28 May 2026.
Here, allow me a fundamental disagreement with the Court of Auditors.
Sovereignty does not have to be "demonstrated".
One does not ask a flag to prove its accounting usefulness before flying over a pediment. One does not ask an army to demonstrate its profitability before defending a border. The integral mastery of our national energy tool falls under the same logic: it is a strategic imperative, not a line in a return-on-investment calculation.
But the real reproach to make to the government is not to have renationalised. It is to have done so in disorder, without a course, without a vision, paying a premium of 45% on the share price when a premium of 30% would have sufficed, saving a billion euros according to the Court. We spent 9.7 billion without even clearly defining what we wanted to do with EDF afterwards. Sovereignty was not the problem. The amateurism of the execution was.
And meanwhile, EDF remains stifled. Its debt still stood at 51.5 billion euros at the end of 2025. And the company faces a wall of investments estimated by the Court of Auditors at 460 billion euros by 2040 to maintain the existing fleet and build the new EPR2s. Source: Court of Auditors, September 2025.
Let us make the synthesis of this organised waste
1⃣ We built, thanks to the money and the vision of previous generations, the most competitive electricity fleet in Europe.
2⃣ We dissolved this competitiveness in a European market that aligns our prices on German gas.
3⃣ We forced EDF to sell at a loss to parasitic intermediaries for fourteen years.
4⃣ We renationalised in haste for 9.7 billion without a clear industrial project.
5⃣ And today, we ask the French and businesses to pay for increasingly expensive electricity, while Michelin closes lines and eliminates 1,500 jobs.
⚡️The French consumer today pays the price of three decades of incoherence: an ideological submission to the rules of an absurd European market, a voluntary weakening of our national operator in the name of an artificial competition, and an erratic management of the shareholder State.
🚨The question is not technical. It is political. Who signed these rules? Who accepted the alignment on the European market? Who maintained the ARENH for fourteen years knowing that it was ruining EDF? Who renationalised without a project? These are not inevitabilities fallen from the sky. They are decisions, taken by identifiable officials, who never had to answer for them.
A country that possesses the cheapest energy in Europe and that manages to make it cost more to its citizens and to ruin its industrialists does not have a resource problem. It has a governance problem.
Inaptocracy: a system of government where those least capable of governing are elected by those least capable of producing, and where the other members of society, those least able to support themselves or to succeed, are rewarded with goods and services that have been paid for by the confiscation of the wealth and labour of a continually diminishing number of producers.
🇫🇷 It is no longer for us to be spectators of the decline.
✏️ EDIT: Update following relevant feedback
This article gave rise, as soon as it was published, to a lively debate with several recognised specialists of the energy sector, including a coordinator of a major French institute for the energy transition, a former analyst of the International Energy Agency, and a professional of the electricity sector, and I thank them for it. Their remarks, precise and documented, lead me to correct and enrich several points. I do so in complete transparency: an argument is worth only through the honesty of the one who carries it, and a well-conducted debate is worth more than an ill-founded certainty.
First correction: the real cost of French nuclear.
I had advanced a production cost close to 33 euros per megawatt-hour. This figure exists, it comes from the DG Treasury and the Court of Auditors, but it corresponds to the accounting cost alone, which takes into account only the amortisations of the historic fleet. This is not the right yardstick. The current economic cost, which integrates maintenance, the major refit and the remuneration of capital, is estimated by the Energy Regulation Commission at between 55 and 63 euros per megawatt-hour. And future nuclear, that of the EPR2s, will be markedly more expensive. I therefore now retain the figure of 60 euros as a reference. This correction changes nothing at the heart of my demonstration: a fleet that produces at 60 euros, and industrialists who pay 165 to 172 euros, that leaves a considerable gap to explain.
Second correction: the ARENH did not benefit only "intermediaries".
I had described the Regulated Access to Historic Nuclear Electricity mechanism as a sale at a loss benefiting essentially parasitic suppliers. It was too simplifying a shortcut, and one of my contradictors is right to underline it. The 42 euros of the mechanism in reality benefited all consumers, individuals as well as industrialists, by redistributing part of the rent of the amortised nuclear fleet. It is even, in large part, what explains that the French paid for their electricity less dearly than their neighbours during those years. It must be said with honesty.
An essential point was also recalled to me, which I should have raised myself: the agreement that replaces the ARENH since 2026, the universal nuclear payment, is considered by specialists as less protective for the consumer than the old mechanism was. In other words, far from having improved the protection of the French consumer, the recent reform risks degrading it. This observation goes in the direction of the alert I am raising, it does not weaken it.
Third enrichment, and the most instructive: the true history of the ARENH.
I must acknowledge that I did not master the whole genesis of this mechanism, and the contribution of a professional of the sector taught me a great deal. Here is what must be understood.
The ARENH was not born of a desire to sell off EDF. It was born of a competitive constraint. At the turn of the 2010s, EDF had in France a quasi-monopoly on electricity production, inherited from the national nuclear effort. Competitors, unable to compete for lack of means of production, complained to the European Commission. The latter then imposed a choice on France: either a heavy fine, or the creation of a mechanism opening the access of competitors to nuclear electricity. This is how the ARENH was born in 2011.
The rate of 42 euros per megawatt-hour then had a precise, and even paradoxical, logic: it was set at a level low enough to discourage the development of renewable energies, which cost much more in 2012. In other words, what many present today as a gift to competitors was also a tool of energy policy.
And here is the most revealing. During the first years, the volumes actually drawn by competitors were low: the market price was then lower than the 42 euros, so much so that in 2016 still, the drawing was almost nil. The situation tipped from 2017, when EDF began to encounter its first major nuclear-production problems: corrosion, maintenance, unavailabilities. The market tightened, its price exceeded 42 euros, and competitors then massively helped themselves in EDF's reservoir at a knock-down price. Over the fourteen years of the mechanism, about 1,100 terawatt-hours were sold off out of the 1,400 theoretically available.
A last decisive point was pointed out to me: EDF had the possibility of indexing this rate of 42 euros on inflation, and did not do so, notably to continue to contain the competition of renewables. Part of the weakening of EDF therefore also stems from internal and strategic decisions of the company itself, and not solely from a constraint imposed from outside.
What these exchanges change, and what they do not change.
I therefore readily acknowledge that the situation is more complex than my initial version suggested. The financial degradation of EDF does not result from a simple external hold-up, but from an entanglement of factors:
A European competitive rule
A poorly calibrated and non-indexed rate
Internal choices of EDF
The effect of the marginal market during crises.
Reality is a skein, not a slogan.
But the political heart of my remarks remains intact, and it is even reinforced by these clarifications. For at the end of this complex history, the concrete result is there, incontestable and uncontested by my contradictors themselves:
France, endowed with the most competitive fleet in Europe, makes its industrialists pay for electricity at 165-172 euros per megawatt-hour, barely less than in Germany, and a major tyre industrialist has just eliminated 1,500 jobs invoking this cost.
As one of my contradictors perfectly summed up: one must choose. Either consumers pay too dearly for nuclear, or they do not pay enough for it, and then EDF is stifled. Another says nothing different in recalling that a political arbitration on the distribution of the competitive advantage of nuclear is necessary.
That is my whole point. This arbitration, which decides who benefits from the rent of a fleet built by decades of public money, is a major political choice. It has never been clearly settled nor debated before the citizens. And as long as it is not, we will continue to suffer the worst of both worlds: a national operator stifled by its debt, and consumers as well as industrialists who pay for electricity too dearly in view of what we know how to produce.
I sincerely thank the specialists who took the time for these exchanges. Their feedback has made this article more accurate. That is exactly what public debate should serve for