France produces some of the cheapest electricity in Europe. Yet the French pay more and more for it. How is that possible?
On May 29, 2026, Michelin announced the loss of 1,500 jobs in France, partly because of the cost of energy. This is not an economic inevitability. It is the result of precise political choices.
The fundamental absurdity
France has one of the most decarbonized and historically competitive nuclear fleets in the Western world. The full cost of producing French nuclear electricity is estimated by the Energy Regulation Commission at between €55 and €63 per megawatt-hour. Logically, French households and companies should benefit from some of the cheapest electricity on the continent.
The opposite has happened. The cause has a name: the European electricity market.
On that market, the price of electricity is not set according to a country’s national production cost. It is aligned with the cost of the last power plant called upon to balance the European grid — very often a gas-fired plant. This is the principle of marginal pricing. When gas prices exploded after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the price of French electricity, even though it was largely produced by long-amortized nuclear plants, rose in the same proportions. In practical terms, France paid for nuclear electricity at the price of gas.
The second scandal: ARENH
For fourteen years, from 2011 to the end of 2025, the State forced EDF, through the mechanism known as regulated access to historic nuclear electricity, to sell up to 100 terawatt-hours of its nuclear production to its own competitors at a price of €42 per megawatt-hour.
Read that carefully: EDF was forced to sell electricity at €42 to alternative suppliers who owned no plants, produced nothing, invested nothing in the nuclear fleet, and simply resold that electricity with a margin. Meanwhile EDF’s real production cost was estimated between €55 and €63 per megawatt-hour. The national operator was therefore weakened in order to create artificial competition.
A strategic tool turned against the country
France had built an energy model that should have protected households and industry. Instead, political decisions dissolved that advantage in a market architecture designed for a different energy mix. The result is a loss of competitiveness, industrial closures, rising bills and growing incomprehension among citizens.
Energy is not an ordinary commodity. It is the foundation of industrial sovereignty, household purchasing power and national independence. A country that no longer controls the price paid by its citizens for the electricity it produces has lost part of its sovereignty.
What should be done?
France must recover control over the pricing of its nuclear electricity. It must defend a national mechanism allowing households and strategic industries to benefit from the real cost of French production. It must stop confusing European ideology with industrial rationality. It must also invest massively in the maintenance and renewal of its nuclear fleet, instead of weakening the very operator that built the system.
The issue is not to reject Europe in principle. It is to refuse a market architecture that destroys the competitive advantage France built over decades.
When a country produces low-carbon electricity at a competitive cost but makes its citizens pay an artificially inflated price, the problem is no longer technical. It is political.