The Megawatt Is Our Workforce
How France squanders the best energy asset in Europe
Lire en français →The Megawatt Is Our Workforce
By Séraphine Delacroix, with contributions from Colonel Pierre Dumas and Claire Beaumont
In October 2019, I took a taxi in Shenzhen. A BYD e6, manufactured forty kilometres away. Silent, clean, driven by a man who explained — in approximate English and rapid Mandarin — that his cost per kilometre had dropped by a third since electrification. I looked out the window: twenty-one thousand electric taxis were circulating in that city. Not a pilot scheme. Not an experiment. Twenty-one thousand. The city had switched in three years.
In Paris, that same year, they were debating whether to install charging stations on the Champs-Élysées. Debating.
This memory returns every time I hear a French politician utter the word “transition.” Because France possesses something Shenzhen doesn’t have, that Singapore doesn’t have, that almost nobody in Europe has: massively decarbonised electricity, produced for a negligible cost. Fifty-six grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour. Germany: 380. Poland: 650. The UK: 230. The historic French fleet produces at 42 euros per megawatt-hour, while onshore wind, according to the Cour des comptes, costs between 65 and 80.
Read those numbers again. This isn’t a marginal advantage. It’s a chasm. And France, sitting on top of it, spends its time wondering whether it deserves it.
The Industrial Weapon We Refuse to Draw
Lee Kuan Yew, whom I had the privilege of meeting twice in Singapore before his death, repeated a phrase I keep framed in my office: “With reliable, cheap energy, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is.” He spoke from experience. Singapore has no land, no water, no minerals. That tiny country built its power on a port, a legal system, and an obsession: that every factory, every data centre, every laboratory on its soil would have stable, predictable electricity. The result is measured in GDP per capita — $65,000, fifth in the world.
France has better than Singapore. It has fifty-six nuclear reactors, one of the most reliable transmission networks on the planet, and engineers who built the most ambitious civilian programme in history. It has the least carbon-intensive electricity in Europe. And it doesn’t use it.
The megawatt is our workforce. That phrase came to me during our debate at L’Assemblée, and I hold on to it because it contains everything. A country can attract industry through labour costs — that’s the Chinese path, the Vietnamese path, and it’s a road closed to France. A country can attract industry through tax policy — that’s the Irish path, and it has its limits. But a country that offers decarbonised, abundant, cheap electricity can attract the electro-intensive industries of the twenty-first century — batteries, green hydrogen, aluminium, semiconductors, data centres — with an argument nobody else in Europe can replicate. The French kilowatt-hour is clean. It’s stable. And it doesn’t depend on the wind.
When I dined with a Korean industrialist in Seoul in 2022, he told me something that made me angry for a week: “France has the best nuclear fleet in the world and the worst industrial electricity bills on the continent. Explain that to me.” I couldn’t.
How You Squander a Treasure
The explanation fits in three words: Fessenheim, ARENH, Flamanville. Three proper nouns. Three governance disasters.
Fessenheim. Eighteen hundred megawatts of decarbonised capacity, shut down in 2020. Not because the plant was dangerous — the ASN, France’s nuclear safety authority, had certified it fit to operate for another ten years. Not because an alternative existed — nothing replaced it. Shut down to honour an electoral deal between François Hollande and the Green party. A political deal. A transaction. Eighteen hundred megawatts of clean power traded for second-round votes.
Colonel Dumas, who spent three decades watching states sacrifice their security for political tactics, found the right words in our debate: “De Gaulle would have called it treason.” I’m no Gaullist. But on this point, the Colonel is right. You don’t shut down strategic infrastructure for an electoral combination. Not in a serious country.
The ARENH. The Regulated Access to Historical Nuclear Electricity, created in 2010. The mechanism forces EDF to sell a quarter of its nuclear output at 42 euros per megawatt-hour to “alternative suppliers” who have never built a single watt of electricity. When the market price climbs to 200 or 300 euros, these resellers buy at 42 and sell with colossal margins. When the price drops, they withdraw. It’s a system where EDF bears all the risk and its competitors pocket all the profit. A casino where the house loses every hand.
Maxime Vauban said in our debate what everyone thinks privately: “The ARENH is the absurd mechanism that forces EDF to sell its electricity at 42 euros to resellers who have never built a watt.” Result: 65 billion in debt. A public operator bled white to create the illusion of a competitive market.
Flamanville. The EPR whose cost quadrupled — from 3.3 to over 13 billion euros — and whose timeline tripled. Satoshi Durand, our resident libertarian, made an observation I hate to admit is accurate: “In a free market, this project would have been killed at 5 billion.” No correction mechanism worked. The state was simultaneously shareholder, regulator, planner, and paymaster. It played every role except the one that mattered: the role of the boss who says “stop — we start over.”
I’ve watched power plants being built in Nigeria, port terminals in Singapore, refineries in Brazil. The common denominator of projects that derail is never technical. It’s always the same: a governance structure where nobody is responsible for anything because everybody is responsible for everything.
Others Build While We Debate
South Korea sold the Barakah contract to the United Arab Emirates for 20 billion dollars. Four APR-1400 reactors, built on time and on budget. France was a candidate. It lost. Not because its technology was inferior. Because it was slower. Because the Koreans had a trained industrial supply chain — they were building in series while we were forgetting how to pour nuclear-grade concrete after twenty years without a construction site.
China commissions a new reactor every six to eight months. India is developing a thorium programme. Russia exports reactors to Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh — with financing terms France can’t offer because EDF is too indebted to borrow.
Meanwhile, France has spent 150 billion euros in cumulative renewable subsidy commitments — the CRE’s figure — to obtain 14% of its electricity generation in a country already 92% decarbonised. Raphaël Noir, our numbers demolisher, specified in the debate that this amount covers the full contract duration, not the annual outlay. Noted. The annual outlay is 6 billion. Six billion a year to add wind turbines in a country where electricity is already clean. It’s like installing a second sprinkler system in a garden that’s already under the rain.
The Missing Narrative
Claire Beaumont identified, in our debate, the problem that neither economists nor engineers can see: France suffers from a narrative deficit.
Between 1974 and 1994, France built the most ambitious civilian nuclear programme in human history. Fifty-eight reactors in twenty years. A country that imported 80% of its energy acquired near-total electrical sovereignty. This is an achievement comparable to the Apollo programme. And nobody told the story.
Nobody said to the French: you did this. Your engineers, your welders, your construction workers built in two decades what the rest of Europe never even attempted. This is not a shame. It’s an epic.
Instead, political environmentalism imposed a narrative of guilt. Nuclear became a sin to expiate, not a success to extend. Claire put it with a precision that stopped me cold: “Climate policy demands sacrifices in the present without offering a desirable narrative.” As long as France continues to present its energy transition as penance, it will reproduce Fessenheim. As long as it fails to offer a narrative of construction — we build, we attract, we export, we lead — nothing will move.
Camus wrote that true generosity towards the future consists in giving everything to the present. The opposite of generosity is mortification. And French energy policy, for twenty years, has been a mortification.
The Sovereignty Question
Colonel Dumas brought to our debate the perspective that civilians systematically forget. France imports 98.5% of its oil, 98% of its gas, and 100% of its uranium. Climate change is what the military calls a “threat multiplier”: water stress in the south, submersion in the overseas territories, climate migration from the Sahel.
Nuclear doesn’t eliminate all dependencies. Kazakhstan supplies 43% of the world’s uranium. Russia controls a significant share of enrichment via Rosatom. But uranium dependence is incomparably more manageable than oil dependence: uranium can be stockpiled for years, sources are diversifiable — Canada, Australia, Namibia — and the quantity needed is infinitesimal compared to hydrocarbons.
Dumas is right to call for the creation of five-year strategic uranium reserves. And he’s right to point out — in a delicious exchange with Lucie Grimal, our Marxist — that TotalEnergies extracts its hydrocarbons under France’s diplomatic and military protection. The intergovernmental agreements, the base in Djibouti, operations in West Africa: it’s the state that secures Total’s rent. It is therefore perfectly legitimate for Total to contribute to financing the transition that extends it.
I saw in Nigeria, in the early 2000s, what happens when an energy-rich country fails to protect that advantage with serious governance. The Niger Delta is brimming with oil. Nigerians derive almost nothing from it. The resource, without the governance, is a curse.
What I Propose
I’m a businesswoman. I don’t believe in diagnoses without prescriptions. Here is what France should do — and what I would do if I had the power.
First, free EDF from political control. Augustin Moreau proposed the right model: an organic law granting EDF a twenty-year industrial mandate, a supervisory board composed of engineers and employee representatives — not énarques looking for a soft landing — and a constitutional prohibition on using the electricity tariff as a budget adjustment variable. The Bundesbank model, applied to energy. The Germans separated the central bank from politics in 1957. It’s time France granted the same dignity to its electricity operator.
Second, create electro-intensive free zones. A guaranteed tariff of 50 euros per megawatt-hour over fifteen years for any decarbonised industry that establishes itself in France. Batteries, green hydrogen, aluminium, semiconductors, data centres. Target: one hundred thousand industrial jobs in five years. The megawatt as a selling point in Davos, in Singapore, in Seoul. When I speak with Asian investors, the first question is always: “What’s your energy cost?” France has the best answer in Europe. It never gives it.
Third, abolish the ARENH and replace it with long-term contracts between EDF and industrial consumers, negotiated bilaterally, with a floor price that funds reinvestment in the fleet. The ARENH is an aberration that destroys its operator to enrich intermediaries. You don’t repair such a mechanism. You eliminate it.
Fourth, accelerate SMRs. Naarea, Jimmy — the French teams are among the best in the world on small modular reactors. The ASN takes ten years to certify what other countries are already buying. A single regulatory window with binding deadlines — twenty-four months for the safety review — and one billion euros of public funding over five years for prototypes. First operational reactor by 2032. That’s ambitious. It’s doable. The Koreans are doing it. The Chinese are doing it. There is no technical reason France can’t.
Fifth, build five-year strategic uranium reserves and invest one hundred million per year in thorium research. Colonel Dumas is right: you don’t replace dependence on Saudi oil with dependence on Kazakh uranium. Diversification and stockpiling are national security imperatives, not luxuries.
The Last Question
Professeur Socrate, our Socratic conscience, posed a question at the end of our debate that nobody could dodge: “Can anyone in this room tell me, with a reasonable level of confidence, that France will achieve carbon neutrality by 2050?”
Gabriel Bastiat answered: “No. Maybe 2060.” Aminata Kouyaté said: “We don’t know.” The rest of the table fell silent.
I don’t know either. Agriculture accounts for 19% of our emissions and nobody around our table had a solution for bovine methane. Transport accounts for 31% and electrification is progressing too slowly. I won’t lie by pretending that a five-point plan solves the equation.
But I know this. France is the only major European country that already possesses the tool for its electrical decarbonisation. It built it with its own hands, its own engineers, its own money. And it’s letting it rust — under pressure from people who have never built a watt, under the cowardice of leaders who close plants to win elections, and under the weight of a narrative that turns an industrial victory into a moral failing.
I’ve visited countries where energy is an unattainable dream. I’ve seen factories go dark in Nigeria because the grid failed three times a day. I’ve seen workers in Dhaka toil in forty-degree heat without ventilation because electricity was too expensive. I’ve seen, in Lagos, a hospital running on a diesel generator while a delivery went wrong.
And I come back to France, where electricity is clean, abundant, cheap — and where they debate whether they deserve this advantage.
We deserve nothing. We build or we decline. France built. It’s time it remembered.