PARIS (Dow Jones)–French power consumption and production dropped in 2009, mostly due to the impact of the current economic downturn, yet France remained, on average, a net electricity exporter last year, France's power network agency, Reseau de Transport d'Electricite, or RTE, said Wednesday.
Last year, France produced in total 518.8 terawatt hours of electricity, down 5.5% from 2008, with nuclear-power production down 6.8%, while hydropower production was down 9.2%, RTE said.
Although RTE doesn't mention the reasons for the nuclear-power production drop in 2009, French state-controlled power giant Electricite de France (EDF.FR), which owns and operates the country's 58 nuclear plants, cited recent maintenance issues, as well as ill-timed employees' strikes, to explain the fall in available nuclear-production capacity.
Wind-power production increased 39.9%, while fossil-fuel-power production increased 3.1% last year from a year earlier, RTE said.
Overall French power consumption dropped 1.6% in 2009 from 2008, with industrial power spending down 8.6% from a year earlier, but with households and individual power consumption up 2% on the year, RTE also said in its yearly report.
Yet during January 2009 as well as in December, the drop in temperatures to below seasonal averages meant that power consumption reached record-high levels, with a historical record of 92,400 megawatts consumed Jan. 7 at 1800 GMT last year, RTE said.
In 2009, France's power-trade surplus dropped 47% from 2008 to 26.4 TWh, mostly due to lower production, and in October, for the first time in 27 years, France was a net power importer over a whole month, having to rely on imports from its European neighbors to meet demand.
RTE, which invested around EUR1.03 billion in the country's power grid in 2009, plans to invest EUR1.116 billion in 2010 in order to secure infrastructure and to expand the network in the northwest and the southeast regions, it said.
