France has regained its place as the leading exporter of electricity in Europe in 2023, far ahead of Sweden and Norway, thanks to the increase in the nuclear fleet affected in 2022 by a historic drop in production, according to data communicated on Wednesday January 17, by the analysis firm S&P Global Commodity Insights.
With 50.1 terawatt hours of net electricity exports in 2023 to its European neighbors, France has regained its place as the leading exporter which was held by Sweden in 2022, according to figures revealed Tuesday by the newspaper The echoes.
In 2023, Sweden and Norway, two countries regularly at the top of the ranking thanks to their abundant hydroelectric production, achieved respectively 28.6 terawatt hours and 17.3 terawatt hours of net exports. Spain, which relies on solar and wind energy, is fourth with 13.9 terawatt hours of net exports.
Records
Placed in 2022 in an unprecedented situation due to corrosion problems detected at the end of 2021 on several nuclear reactors, France had been a net importer of electricity for almost the entire year, which had not happened for forty- two years.
Since then, nuclear and hydroelectric electricity production, dominated by the historic operator EDF, has recovered. With the restart of its reactors, EDF’s nuclear production increased to 320.4 terawatt hours in 2023 compared to 279 terawatt hours in 2022, a historically low level since 1988. In this context, France recorded new records for exports of ‘electrons.
On January 3, France recorded “a new maximum export balance of 20.3 gigawatts”thus shattering the previous export records, which occurred in February 2019 (17.4 gigawatts) and December 2023 (18.7 gigawatts), specified RTE, the high voltage network manager, in early January.
Fall in German exports
Germany, for its part, found itself in the position of net importer of 10 terawatt hours in 2023, a first since 2002. The reasons given are diverse.
For Emeric de Vigan, vice-president in charge of electricity markets at Kpler, this situation can be explained by the abandonment in this country of its last three nuclear power plants, which represented 6% of the electricity produced in Germany. “Its absence is enough to create some tension as soon as the wind fails” in wind farms, he commented to Agence France-Presse.
For other experts, the decline in German electricity exports is mainly a question of price. Germany used to flood its neighbors with cheap coal-fired electricity, now more expensive due to higher CO pricing2.