Tribune. The left, fragmented and weakened, little able to offer its potential voters a shared horizon, has it found a new mantra: transform any problem into a “common good” saved by the central state? This is what suggests a column devoted to the electricity market published on May 31 in The world, which seems to reconcile Thomas Piketty, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Arnaud Montebourg, Eric Piolle and Benoît Hamon.
The text proposes nothing less than to make electricity a ” common good “ left the market, which means for the authors to entrust its production, distribution and supply to a public operator who would be the only one to invest in the energy transition, with the return to a regulated tariff, and a dose of “Citizen control” for good measure.
Structural problem
This forum is enough to despair those who call for an efficient and fair energy transition, but are interested in energy economics, the history of the electricity market, and experiences in the rest. from Europe.
First, this forum seems to ignore the basic characteristics of the electricity market. She claims that the price of electricity has increased due to market liberalization alone, charging it to management costs and operators’ profits, which no statistics confirm. The increase in the price of electricity at the time of opening up to competition should not be naively attributed to the latter, by confusing correlation and causation.
The price increase is explained by multiple factors, such as the drop in the load factor of EDF nuclear power plants, the social demand for increased security of the means of production and distribution – landfill is expensive – , or the rise in fossil fuel prices, on which depends the cost of the additional kWh, the “marginal cost”, necessary to supply electricity when demand increases. It is a structural problem in this market: the price of electricity depends on that of gas and oil, and the return to monopoly would not change anything.
Another old moon, the belief in the fact that a public monopoly backed by the State would invest more massively and more efficiently than any other actor. It is first of all refusing to see that all the countries which are ahead in the energy transition today are making the opposite choice, because private actors are better able to provide innovative solutions, and that the projects are most often driven by a complex combination of public and private investors, initiatives of local authorities and actors of the social and solidarity economy, solutions impossible by closing the public sector in on itself.
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