Would the price of electricity have increased by 45% without state intervention?

The electricity bill could have been even higher. Invited this Thursday, January 20 on the set of LCI, François Bayrou wanted to salute the action of the government, “intervened with force” to avoid soaring energy prices. According to the High Commissioner for Planning “if we had let the mechanisms play” of the market, “the increase should have been 45%” instead of the 4% promised by the executive. An argument taken up later, at the end of the Council of Ministers, by the government spokesperson, for whom this measure “blocks the exponential increase in the price of gas and electricity”. But where does this number come from?

It comes from the latest deliberation of the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE), published on Wednesday. It is responsible for independently reviewing regulated electricity tariffs in the country. A calculation she makes by “cost stacking” and that it publishes every six months at most, in order to set prices for EDF. This calculation method, detailed in the appendix to the deliberation, includes the economic costs of the French company responsible for the production and supply of electricity, but also the cost of nuclear production, the transport costs and the related to energy supply.

However, for February 2022, the electricity police proposed an increase in the average level of regulated electricity sale tariffs of 44.5% excluding tax. A price explosion that takes into account “the context of the exceptional crisis in energy prices, characterized by an unprecedented increase in prices on the wholesale electricity markets”, as it states in its deliberation. Usually, when it fixes the tariffs for EDF, these prices are automatically accepted… In the absence of opposition from the government!

So it is indeed thanks to the government’s choice to put in place what it calls a “tariff shield” prices will remain controlled. “The increases will be limited to 4% after a refusal of the CRE tariff proposal”, we read in the deliberation of the CRE. A decision that will be felt in the wallets of the French. While a 4% increase in tariffs “will represent an increase of around 38 euros per year” on a residential customer’s bill, “in the absence of these measures”, the bill would have increased by “330 euros per year”, specifies the regulator.

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