"Nuclear power was a logical choice of top-down decision-making and the result of the total absence of a willingness by the central state to share political power on energy issues..."
The French Centralized System
France, for example, governed by a very centralized political system, quite naturally has always been looking for centralized answers to energy-supply challenges. Nuclear power was a logical choice of top-down decision-making and the result of the total absence of a willingness by the central state to share political power on energy issues with regional or even local govern- ments. Like a steamroller, the state-sponsored nuclear logic wiped out small and medium-sized industries trying to develop new and renewable energy sources. In a similar way, efficiency efforts have been often suffocated. By the mid 1980s, it had become clear that the state utility EDF had massively overbuilt (in the order of 16 nuclear power plants). Instead of adjusting the equipment planning, the state dismantled most of the Energy Efficiency Agency and EDF went for two strategic choices: long-term electricity export agreements and widespread promotion of electric space and water heating. This strategy has led to the single most significant barrier for the development of energy efficiency+renewables in France. Hundreds of thousands of buildings have been built without chimneys, thus without a low-cost opportunity to switch to a less wasteful and polluting heat sources than electricity. In recent years the tendency has even increased and around 75% of all new French homes are equipped with electric space heating. There are cases where new urban heating networks pass by electricity-heated buildings without any chance of hooking them up because of what is felt as disproportionate investment costs.
The other side-effect of the massive thermal use of electricity – almost half of the residential power consumption in France – is the spectacular increase of the winter peak load that exceeds now three times the lowest load-day in summer. The result is a considerable increase in fossil fuel use for power generation (an increase of about 25% since 1990), the restart of up to 40-year-old oil-fired power plants and the rapidly increasing import of electricity, in particular coal-fired power from Germany. In fact, in January 2010 France was a net importer of electricity – after October 2009 the second net import month in 27 years.
The energy efficiency+renewables efforts in France have remained severely underdeveloped. Logically, per capita electricity consumption is significantly higher than the EU average or in a country like Italy, which abandoned nuclear power after the Chernobyl disaster. In 2008 Spain added more wind power capacity (4,600 MW) than France had installed in total by 2007 (4,060 MW).
The idea that the French nuclear system has led to a low carbon content of its economy is wrong. As new figures published by the French government37 illustrate, taking into account the net carbon content of imported goods (minus the carbon content of exported items), per capita greenhouse gas emissions (2005) increase from 8.7 t to 12 t of CO2equivalent and thus almost reach the level of coal-based Germany.38 France has a large trade deficit while Germany has been the world’s leading export nation until China took over in 2009.
Pg 21,22
systems for change:
nuclear power vs. energy efficiency+renewables?
by antony Froggatt with Mycle schneider
http://boell.org/downloads/HBS-Frogatt_web.pdf
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