France's Energy Mirage

The latest red flag waving over the dead-end of massive reliance on renewables: Germany is pivoting hard to gas. Meanwhile, France charges full speed ahead toward the abyss.

Anyone who manages to see clearly through the thick fog enveloping France’s energy policy is kindly requested to report urgently to the Prime Minister’s office.

While studies, reports, analyses, and warnings pile up (in some dusty closet, perhaps?), how on earth are we supposed to make sense of the government’s—and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s—blatant determination to ram through, by decree and with zero regard for rational, science-based, or technical considerations, an energy roadmap that’s steering France straight toward massive blackouts and unbearably high energy prices?

How to fathom this ministerial edict to “restart electricity production to decarbonize” (Lecornu’s own words), when any surplus generation that consumption fails to swallow is already threatening to destabilize the grid—never mind those episodes of negative prices that are becoming routine?

How to comprehend the push for a massive nuclear revival (six new reactors under construction, eight more on the potential list) alongside a full-throttle stubborn rollout of renewables (the PM has ruled out any moratorium, unlike one of RTE’s, the French grid operator, scenarios), when the core problem—the storage of electricity from intermittent sources—remains unsolved?

The European Commission fantasizes about fixing it by densifying cross-border interconnections, thereby multiplying the vulnerability of the entire network.

How can anyone ignore the conveniently shelved internal EDF report, demonstrating that the decree launching France’s third multi-year energy programming—the country’s energy roadmap for the next decade—would further sink the public utility?

Thanks to the priority given to wind and solar on the grid, and the market dogma that enforces it, nuclear modulation will cost EDF €4 billion per year.

How can we fail to see that this entire equation is rotten to the core? Nuclear power, still the biggest chunck in France’s mix, is set to be nibbled away by renewables that are neither dispatchable nor storable at scale today, and utterly dependent on third countries that can turn off the tap on critical materials whenever it suits them—as the European Court of Auditors has once again pointed out in a recent report.