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Want to bet how popular a system that basically funnel money from a state-owned company, consumers and industry towards companies producing absolutely nothing is? Was that done for the greater good?
France's state-owned company has delivered among the cheapest electricity in Europe, with a stable and reliable grid. Then it was decided that electricity should be a free market. "People of France, do you agree with that plan? -Fuck no!! -Too bad, LOL!" And later. "People of France, some of you could not afford to pay your bill due to this absurdly stupid and infuriating system. Do you want it to go away? -YES! -Well, fuck you then…"
No. If you balance the price weighing the cost of each source, 5% of the production going x10 does not make your bill go x10.
We had a system that worked much better. State-owned company EDF was offering cheap rates, solid grid, and was much better at planning that the mess we have now where anyone can suddenly put solar panels and wind turbines pretty much anywhere without consideration for the local grid and just demand to be connected to the grid and have their electricity bought full.
So ironically, increasing renewable in this chaotic way right now is increasing the overall cost: nuke work almost at constant cost. If you reduce their output so that you can take electricity from solar or wind, you have your constant nuke cost plus the price you pay to whoever turned on the renewable sources.
Note that I'm all for renewable and not opposed to getting out of nuke if that makes sense. But at the scale of a country, you need an architect to manage all of that. We no longer have one.
And the whole reason the current system was forced on France was because its cheaper electricity was giving it too much of a competitive advantage. That was not acceptable for our bigger neighbour on the east side.
The question was asked to Nicolas Sarkozy as to why he agreed to it (that was under his watch). He basically answered this was that or going back to internal wars in Europe (I'm not making this up). Maybe he's ideologically cabled to prefer free market (note that's not at all what we have at the end), maybe he got money from all these distributors racking up money not doing anything, maybe he was indeed constrained by his partners and got something in exchange, but he couldn't tell what (??). But that was the shit of an excuse.
That's your well working democracy. Fucking over a country for the benefit of a stronger one.