“Stop the destruction of EDF!” Employees of the group will be on strike on Wednesday January 26 against the request of the State-shareholder to sell more electricity at low prices to its competitors in order to contain the electricity bill of households and businesses. Faced with soaring energy prices, the government has drawn up an arsenal of measures to contain bills, and honor its promise to limit the increase in regulated electricity prices to 4% in 2022, in a sensitive context. a few weeks before the presidential election.
At the energy company, the latest measure announced sparked an outcry: the government asked EDF to increase by 20 terawatt hours (TWh) the volume of nuclear electricity sold at a reduced price to its competitors, to increase it from 100 to 120 TWh on an exceptional basis. This measure will have “a cost for EDF of between 7.7 billion and 8.4 billion euros depending on market prices”, said the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire.
After this announcement, the four main unions in the energy sector called for a strike by EDF employees on Wednesday, while the group is already struggling with new delays for the EPR in Flamanville (Manche) and with the extension to new reactors of a corrosion problem on safety systems.
“At the end of the day, those who will pay will always be the citizens, through their bill. Through their taxes too, because, if there is a recapitalization and the like, all these billions that are squandered, it is somewhere the average citizen who also pays for it”, estimated with AFP Fabrice Coudour, for the CGT.
During a trip to the north of France at the end of the week, the Minister of Industry, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, assured that there was no “No way” of “weaken” EDF. But a rare fact, this government measure moved even the highest levels of business: in an internal message to EDF executives, CEO Jean-Bernard Lévy strongly criticized the government’s decision, which he “fought” and whom he described as a “real shock”.