The national secretary of the Communist Party Fabien Roussel accused TotalEnergies of having made money on the back of EDF. Comments deemed “slanderous and defamatory” by TotalEnergies.
Communist deputy Fabien Roussel accused TotalEnergies on Wednesday February 22 of having made money by taking advantage of the cheap electricity sold by EDF to its competitors: “EDF sells electricity at 42-46 euros per megawatt hour to private suppliers, including Total, and Total resells this electricity at 180, 200, 300, 400 euros to people, but also to EDF, because EDF has no no longer enough electricity as they sold it to supply people”, he said on BFM. If the beginning of the declaration is true: EDF sells part of its production at very low prices, on the other hand Fabien Roussel is then caricatural, in particular on Total.
The mechanism of the Arenh
We resume in order: First, EDF does sell some of its electricity at a low price per kilowatt hour. This is the Arenh mechanism for “Regulated access to historical nuclear electricity”. To put it simply: with this device, the State obliges EDF to sell part of its production at 42 euros per megawatt hour to all alternative electricity suppliers, including TotalEnergies.
Last year, exceptionally, the State asked EDF to sell even more electricity at low prices to these alternative suppliers. Objective: to lower household bills. However, this decision has consequences since EDF, which had many nuclear power plants shut down in 2022, finally ran out of electricity and had to buy it on the markets.
Arenh electricity cannot be resold
Was Total able to resell this same electricity to EDF, but at a much higher price? No, this is where Fabien Roussel makes a shortcut because this inexpensive electricity purchased from EDF is not the one that is resold on the markets, but only that produced by TotalEnergies, via its gas power plants, its wind turbines and its solar panels. Furthermore, the volume of Arenh received by TotalEnergies is “passed on to customers in our commercial offers”defended the group in a statement sent to franceinfo.
What is certain is that EDF has actually paid much more for its missing electricity since since the start of the war in Ukraine, the price of the megawatt hour has skyrocketed. We were around 300 euros last summer, that is to say the prices mentioned by Fabien Roussel
EDF bought on the markets
Was Total able to sell electricity to EDF at higher prices? This is possible, because when EDF buys on the markets, they are supplied by a multitude of producers, including Total Energies.
Clearly: Fabien Roussel highlights the limits of the electricity market but it is wrong to say that the electricity purchased by Total from EDF at low prices was resold by Total at up to six times more expensive to EDF.