Money will eventually win the war. Depressing way to get there but this crisis will accelerate the change.

EDF's accounts show that the government compensated for the effect on its revenues of this price shield ( https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/2024-03/20240315... , page 184).

No, it's correct, the total costs of the 2022 bailout was almost 10bn, and that was to get control over a company that had over 50bn in debt.

Furthermore it was discovered that the plants had neglected maintenance that had to be undertaken rightaway, that had nothing to do with the TRV.

Of course, the TRV didn't help, it caused a loss of 18bn in 2022 on top of everything else, but things were bad already.

So even if the mentioned 5 bn export now was pure profit - which is isn't - it would take 15-20 years to cover the bailout that has already taken place. The 100 billion of investments until 2035 is in addition to that.

And they will have to sell their power on markets that will increasingly often have free electricity from solar and wind. How do you pay 1000 educated plant operators when electricity prices are negative?

Unfortunately nuclear power isn't the kind of thing you can try and then walk away from when it turns out to be a bad idea. Which is likely the main reason it's still around.

Nope. Electricity exports are officially exported at a loss, since the average price per MWh exported is generally slightly lower than the average French spot price ( https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2025-04/2025-04-09... , page 87). According to the sound approach established by Mr. Boiteux, this price must compensate for production costs as well as investments.

The average market price is decreasing because the renewable energy sector is expanding across the continent, thus supplying more and more electricity at a production cost that is increasingly lower than that of nuclear power.

According to RTE, France will export 92.3 TWh in 2025 (page 75), paid €5.4 billion (page 15), meaning that the average price per MWh will be €58.7. However, this renewable energy sector (considered fully amortized) will produce electricity at a cost of €60.3 according to the CRE (which considers it fully amortized and therefore neglects the bulk of the investment), and at around €78 according to EDF ( https://www.edf.fr/sites/groupe/files/epresspack/6300/CP_Con... ), which wants to build EPR2 reactors and therefore needs to have the necessary funds.

In short, France is exporting at €58.70 a year when it needs to sell for at least €78 to finance its future reactors, thus "using up" its current fleet without setting aside enough money to replace it.

Worse still: if the costs of the EPR2 reactors exceed forecasts, as all EPR construction projects (Finland, France, China, and the UK) have done, the deficit will increase even further.

Fixed costs (investments, maintenance, depreciation of the EPR alone, etc.) are by definition paid whether the fleet produces or not. Therefore, exporting at a price higher than the variable costs (paid only if the plant produces) is a lesser evil because the difference covers a portion of the fixed costs: it is less expensive to export at a slight loss than not to produce and lose more (in technical terms: the gross margin helps cover fixed costs).

However, claiming that nuclear power is profitable simply because of electricity exports is misleading, and the ideal solution would be to produce electricity at the lowest possible cost, therefore using renewable energy sources.

Furthermore, a portion of France's electricity is generated from renewables, so attributing exports solely to nuclear power is misleading.

They only have 22GW of coal generation remaining to replace, which should take no longer than 5-10 years. These generators are already at the end of their life, so they have no other choice but to go forward with renewables and storage.

A glimpse into the future, as is Spain, as is California. Some are further on their journey than others. Those at the frontier will teach the rest of us how to solve for the hardest parts.

https://www.pv-tech.org/australia-mandates-three-hour-free-s...

https://openelectricity.org.au/analysis/40-renewable-and-ris...

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The thesis is simply this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

Of course, there is nuance, but the facts are that in the next 10-20 years, renewables and storage will have destroyed demand for fossil fuels for electrical generation. That's progress. We might go faster or slower, depending on policy and other factors, but this is the trajectory we are currently on, based on the data presented in this piece.

The Economist wrote a piece explaining this, if that is helpful:

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential... | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024

> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

So! The transition is going fast (~1TW/year), and it is likely to continue to increase in speed (more solar manufacturing and battery storage will continue to be be built year over year, increasing annual production and deployment rates from today's rate(s)), based on all available data and observations. This is the good news to cheer. Nameplate and capacity factor arguments are meaningless in this context. We are at the hockey stick inflection point: look up.