After a year 2022 marked by historically low electricity production, the government said on Friday that it was counting on EDF CEO Luc Rémont and group employees to “restore all EDF electricity production as soon as possible.”
“The recovery of EDF’s finances will be prioritized by increasing the volume of production”, commented the Minister for the Economy Bruno Le Maire and the Minister for Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher a few minutes after the disastrous announcement of the annual financial results by the electrician, in whom, however, they maintain “all confidence”.
“They want the new EPR project decided by the President of the Republic to be drawn up,” they also declare, while the obligatory public debate on the construction of these new generation reactors has recently come to an end, considering that the political decisions were already taken anyway.
17.9 billion loss
The group, on which the State launched a takeover bid in order to facilitate the construction of the six new nuclear reactors required by President Emmanuel Macron, reported this Friday a strong net loss of 17,900 million euros in 2022, after having registered in 2021 a profit of more than 5,000 million euros. This is one of the biggest losses in France’s recent history, behind France Telecom (20.7 billion) and Vivendi Universal (23.3 billion) twenty years ago.
In fact, the year 2022 was marked by the closure of many nuclear reactors, due to scheduled maintenance operations but also to corrosion problems. Result: In 2022, the average availability of the 56-reactor fleet fell to 54% (versus 73% in the 2015-2019 period), raising the threat of power outages in the dead of winter.
Source: BFM TV
