That’s it: after six months of work and nearly 150 hours of hearings, the deputies of the commission of inquiry ” aimed at establishing the reasons for the loss of France’s energy sovereignty made their findings public on Thursday, April 6. The document thus signs the epilogue of an extraordinary sequence, during which a number of business leaders, senior civil servants, scientists, former political leaders and even two former Presidents of the Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande , had to speak in turn about the errors in France’s energy strategy, which led to the risk of a supply disruption this winter. What to draw up the trial of what the rapporteur, Antoine Armand (Haute-Savoie, Renaissance) describes as ” slow drift ” and of ” political rambling since the mid-1990s.
“It is the story of decisions sometimes taken upside down, without methods, without prospective, with heavy consequences, and which can only find their source in unconsciousness or electoralism”, he insisted. Thursday with the press.
But if the twists and such punchlines followed one another over the convocations, sometimes accumulating several hundred thousand views on YouTube – a rare thing for parliamentary work – the results seemed, to a large extent, a foregone conclusion, whereas a good majority of the deputies of the committee defend nuclear power. Unsurprisingly, these therefore mainly recommend relaunching the atom as soon as possible, highlighting the needs for sovereignty and reindustrialisation, in line with the ideas of the rapporteur and the president (Raphaël Schellenberger, Haut-Rhin, LR). Nothing revolutionary, at the very moment when the executive intends to mobilize the same levers, breaking with past decisions.
A succession of nuclear errors, according to the report
Because one of the main errors (the report identifies six) was to oppose renewable energies and nuclear power », and not « not having anticipated the extension of the life of nuclear power plants and their renewal in industrial series, not in isolated construction sites “, underlines the commission. Indeed, from 2015, France enshrined in its law the gradual closure of its atomic fleet, in order to reduce the share of nuclear power to 50% by 2025 (compared to 75% until then). A decision ” destructive » et « deadly ” for the sector, which ” could not have been supported by a technical, industrial and scientific impact study », Considers Antoine Armand.
It must be said that the sector is doing badly: from around 400 terawatt hours (TWh) per year around the 2010s, EDF’s nuclear production fell to 279 terawatt hours last year, a historically low level. In question, in particular: a corrosion defect discovered at the end of 2021 in several reactors, resulting in the shutdown of a large part of the fleet to check it and, if necessary, repair it. 2022 will also remain the year of yet another delay for the Flamanville EPR, initiated in 2007, and of the worsening of EDF’s financial difficulties.
In addition, MEPs regret the shutdown of the fourth-generation Surperphénix reactor in 1997 and the end in 2019 of the Astrid study program for a fast neutron reactor, which would have enabled France to take a ” unique advance in the world to build the power plants of tomorrow, which are more economical and produce less waste.
Underestimation of the need for electricity
And these shortcomings, according to the parliamentarians, find their source in another misunderstanding: the underestimation of the electricity needs to get rid of fossil fuels, having led to a chronic undersizing of the production infrastructures. This goes back a long way: the period from 1990 to 2010 marked a “ lost decade “, because of a ” overcapacity illusion », Considers Antoine Armand.
“On the pretext that at time T, production was higher than consumption, and that EDF was exporting while strengthening its industrial model, there was no reflection on the aging of the fleet, although addressed from the late 1990s by theParliamentary office for the evaluation of scientific and technological choices “, laments the rapporteur.
Especially since the situation persists after 2010: in 2015, three of the five trajectories relating to the evolution of the mix presented by RTE, the operator of the electricity transmission network, provide for ” a decline or near stagnation » in power consumption over the next few decades. It was only at the end of 2021, with its famous Energy Futures 2050 study, that RTE clearly stated that the demand for electricity will increase significantly in order to replace thermal uses, and this in all scenarios (including sobriety). ” In 2010, a report commissioned by Eric Besson [alors ministre chargé de l’Industrie, de l’Énergie et de l’Économie numérique, ndlr] already predicted a possible increase. This clearly did not reach Arnaud Montebourg’s office. […] All this led too late to a relaunch of the nuclear project “says Antoine Armand.
To remedy this, the report recommends in particular to adopt a long-term energy ambition, running on ” at least the next 30 years “. With nuclear, therefore, but also renewable energies, since the ” energy wall will not wait until 2035 (the expected date for the commissioning of the first of the 6 future EPRs).
ARENH under fire from critics
Furthermore, the report criticizes the European framework ” disadvantageous EDF », and in particular the ARENH mechanism (regulated access to historical nuclear electricity) which results from it. This device, described as poison by the former CEO of EDF Jean-Bernard Lévy, forces the group to sell 100 TWh each year to its competitors at less than 50 euros per megawatt hour (MWh), a price cut compared to the course of the market.
“It’s a bad arrangement, which allows successive governments not to pay the energy bill that falls on bad decisions taken at European level, and makes EDF pay it,” argues Antoine Armand.
Result: the commission proposes purely and simply to ” immediately suspend and compensate ARENH “, the time to negotiate a ” profound reform of the European framework for energy policies (which disadvantages large groups in the name of market liberalisation). The goal : ” May our main decarbonized and sovereign producer not be brought down “, according to the rapporteur.
Something to worry electro-intensive industrialists. ” It would be a very bad blow to French industry “, communicated in the wake of the Uniden (Union of Industries Energy Users). And to continue:
« By providing more than 50% of the electricity needs of industry in France, ARENH is a necessary shock absorber against the ups and downs of the wholesale market; it is also a fundamental short- and medium-term visibility factor at a time when the challenge of its decarbonization, and therefore of the electrification of processes, arises ».
Asked by the TribuneRaphaël Schellenberger asserts, however, that the abolition of ARENH in favor of a new mechanism should only occur at ” middle term », the urgency being to « reduce its volume » et « redefine its price “. Positions always contrary to those of Uniden, which has been calling for months to increase the quantity of electricity supplied at knock-down prices by EDF, in the name of consumer protection.