ENERGY bills in France look a fair amount lower in comparison with current prices in Scotland.
Take electricity, for example. In February 2025, one kilowatt hour cost around €0.215 in France. With the average French household consuming roughly 5681kWh of electricity a year, this would amount to €1221 — or £1011.
Meanwhile, the price of electricity in the UK is €0.249 per kilowatt hour, which would cost €1415, or £1172, for the same annual household electricity use.
The picture was even more stark during the energy crisis in 2022.
The average UK annual energy bill threatened to exceed £4000 during that time – nearly tripling in the space of 12 months.
French households, meanwhile, barely saw their costs increase.
But why is this the case?
The National spoke with Renaud Foucart – a senior lecturer at the Department of Economics at Lancaster University.
The academic – who has conducted research into market regulation and the systems used to allocate commodities such as electricity – said that the big difference when it comes to the UK and France when it comes to energy is ownership.
“In France, when the EDF (France's state owned energy company) wants to help consumers, they can partly do it using state funds,” he said.
“There's been a lot of debt used to reduce the price cap on energy for consumers.”
Amid the energy crisis, for example, the French government froze gas prices and limited the increase of the regulated price of electricity to just 4%.
“Among the many things they have to do is to sell nuclear energy at a price which is not the production cost, but way below the market price,” Foucart explained – adding that the French system isn’t efficient in that sense.
“The EDF lost a lot of money at a time where all the electricity companies in the world were making massive profits,” he said.
“This is something that goes against conventional wisdom in economics. Something that I was not convinced was a good idea at the time. But the UK ended up doing the same, but later and with only the government budget.”
The academic added: “So, the main message I think from that is that keeping some form of government guarantee or ownership is kind of an insurance in case of big shock.”
When it comes to the price difference in 2025 between the UK and France, Foucart was keen to stress there isn’t an enormous one, although France’s reliance on nuclear power often does help lower electricity prices.
This is because nuclear power is a relatively low-cost source of electricity, and thus allows France to produce a significant portion of their energy at a cheaper rate and export surplus electricity to neighbouring markets.
“The thing is that the UK will never be France in the sense that you don't have any plan to have like 80% nuclear power right now, so you're not going to have the ownership of massive power plants creating a massive baseload,” Foucart said.
“It will not happen and it would cost too much capital.”
