After 88 hearings, including those of two former Presidents of the Republic, the parliamentary commission of inquiry into France’s energy independence has delivered its report.
“The story that has been reconstituted before us is indeed the story of a slow drift, of a political wandering, often unconscious and inconsequential, which has distanced us both from the ecological transition and from our energy sovereignty…“After more than six months of work, the Commission of Inquiry into Energy Sovereignty in France issued a very critical report on France’s energy policy on Thursday denouncing “a loss of sovereignty“. The deputies did not mince words to point out the errors of France’s energy policy over the last thirty years in their report, published on Thursday 6 April.
>> The president of the commission of inquiry on energy sovereignty denounces “a lack of awareness of the strategic nature of energy” in France
Thus, the nuclear fleet has seen its production drop for 15 years, without any government worrying about it until the painful awakening of 2022, and the closure of power plants for cracks, in particular, underline the authors of the report, l Alsatian LR Raphaël Schellenberger and the Renaissance deputy of Haut-Savoie Antoine Armand.
The role of François Hollande
In their text, very favorable to the atom, they award a particularly bad mention to François Hollande and his program of reactor closures after Fukushima, decided without prior study. The leaders of the time are accused of having acted against the vital interests of the country. Guest on franceinfo, Raphaël Schellenberger thus denounces a “lack of awareness of the strategic nature of energy which has led to what we prefer to do political politics and perhaps even sometimes simple electoral agreements, rather than treating this subject as a strategic issue for competitiveness and sovereignty of our nation“. And to continue: “It starts before François Hollande. We saw this at the end of the 1990s, when the Socialist Party concluded an agreement with the Greens which led to the abandonment of a certain number of projects for the construction of new nuclear power stations and which led to the closure of the project Superphénix, which was nevertheless a project which would have projected France into innovation and one step ahead of the whole world.”
The rapporteurs, however, avoid questioning the role of Emmanuel Macron, then Deputy Secretary General of the Elysée, then Minister of the Economy of François Hollande. They also deplore the launch deemed hasty of the Flamanville EPR: incomplete plans, industrial sector too weakened by years of lack of orders are pinpointed.
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“At the highest level of the state, not everyone is connected yet”
Finally, the rapporteurs are worried about the future: with the explosion in demand for electricity, the fragility of EDF and the sector worries them. The report formulates thirty proposals adopted by the members of the committee last week. Raphaël Schellenberger calls for “an awareness”: “Our work, which was closely followed by the entire energy industry, which was closely followed by all French people, who wondered why they were being asked to put on turtlenecks and lower the heating temperature, brought about this awareness. Now, we have, with the rapporteur, with the members of the commission of inquiry, the responsibility of bringing this case to life, of continuing to point out the need to deal with it, of setting up political pressure to make the decisions we advocate. […] I have the feeling that at the highest level of the State, everyone is not yet connected on the need to consider this subject as absolutely strategic“, he however confided.
In particular, they are asking for closer monitoring of the construction of future EPR 2 reactors and better anticipation of the transition to 50 years of the current fleet.