France's Electricity Suicide

France makes some of the cheapest electricity on Earth.

French people pay some of the most expensive bills in Europe.

Read that again.

(If you read my piece on French taxes, this is the sequel. Same disease, different organ.)

Start with the fact nobody disputes.

France runs the biggest nuclear fleet in Europe. 56 reactors. State-owned.

Cost to produce a kilowatt-hour: about 6 cents.

Among the cheapest, cleanest power on the planet.

So why is your bill brutal?

Two reasons. Both self-inflicted.

Reason 1: France doesn't sell you its electricity. It sells you gas prices.

Europe has one rule for pricing power. The most expensive plant running sets the price for everyone.

Nuclear runs first. It's cheap. Doesn't matter.

The last plant to switch on is usually gas. That sets the price. And every producer gets paid that price.

So France makes power at 6 cents and bills you like it burned Russian gas to make it.

The gap doesn't vanish. EDF keeps it.

You pay gas prices for nuclear electricity. In the most nuclear country in the world.

It got worse. For years France was forced to sell its cheap nuclear to competitors at 42 euros. A law called ARENH.

2022, peak madness: middlemen bought EDF's power at 46 and sold it back to EDF at 257.

EDF lost 17.9 billion euros in one year.

You can't write satire this good.

And here's the part that should make you put down your coffee.

It costs about 6 cents to make a French kilowatt-hour. You pay around 22.

The electricity is the cheapest thing on your electricity bill.

The rest is grid, taxes, and margin. Everything stapled to the power costs more than the power.

Reason 2: instead of making energy cheaper, France pays you to use less of it.

There's a scheme called CEE. Energy-saving certificates.

The state forces suppliers to fund insulation, new boilers, "efficiency."

Sounds nice. Here's the catch. The state doesn't pay for it. It's bolted onto your bill. Around 10 billion euros a year.

Opaque. Riddled with fraud. Fake renovations, fake paperwork.

Think about the logic.

You have the cheapest power source in Europe sitting right there. And the grand plan is to spend billions begging you to switch off the lights.

You don't ration water next to a river.

Now look across the border.

Germany's electricity is expensive. Gas-dependent. A mess.

So what does Germany do? Subsidizes its factories down to 5 cents a kilowatt-hour. Pays them to stay.

France has the 6-cent power and subsidizes nobody.

So the factory moves to Germany. Buys subsidized power. Sometimes French power, flowing across the border. Builds the product. Ships it back.

And the French buy it. At a markup.

We export the cheap electricity and import the finished good. Paying extra to use our own advantage against ourselves.

And here's the proof the whole thing works.

France already figured out that cheap nuclear is bait. It just refuses to share it with you.

SoftBank put 75 billion euros on the table for AI data centers in France. Why? Energy is half the cost of running AI, and France's grid is the cheapest clean power in Europe. 109 billion got pledged at a single summit. Amazon, Microsoft, the Emiratis, all of them.

The global AI buildout is a 7 trillion dollar wave this decade. It runs on one thing: cheap, clean power. France has it in a quantity almost no one else does.

So France knows exactly what its electricity is worth.

It sells that price to Microsoft. It bills you 22 cents.

One catch, and it's important. Most of that "investment" is pledges. Announcements, not poured concrete. France keeps winning the press release. Whether it wins the factory is another question. And the gap shows. France's flagship lab, Mistral, has raised about 4 billion dollars. OpenAI has raised 186 billion. Anthropic, 161 billion.

The bottleneck was never electricity.

And the kicker.

France is one of the biggest net payers into the EU. Around 26 billion euros a year out the door.

A lot of it flows east. To countries that then offer cheaper labor, lighter charges, and pull the factories that should've been ours.

We fund our own competitors. Then buy back what they build.

The fix is embarrassingly simple.

Sell electricity to French homes and industry at cost. Strip the windfall and the tax pile and you're near 12 cents tomorrow.

Then take EDF's profits and pour them into the grid and new reactors. The price keeps falling. 10 cents. 9. 8.

The advantage compounds. Every year it gets cheaper, and every year it gets more insane to leave it on the table.

Suddenly France is the cheapest place in Europe to run anything. Factories come here. Data centers come here. Jobs come here.

This is the cleanest argument for renegotiating France's place in the EU energy market that exists. At minimum the deal gets reopened. At maximum it's the first honest case for leaving.

Not emotion. Not flags. Just math.

France has no winning move in the current setup. It's pure loss, top to bottom. And it poisons everything, because energy is the thing every other thing needs to work.

France was handed the best energy hand in Europe.

And it's playing it face-down, on purpose.