The day our region became Europe's electricity gold medallist — Lyon Mag
I have a contribution in Lyon Mag on a shift nobody announced, not even the parties concerned: Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes has become Europe’s leading electricity-producing region.
A century-old gold medal changes hands
There was no decree and no press release. In 2023, North Rhine-Westphalia — land of lignite and RWE cooling towers — handed Europe’s top spot to the Rhône valley. Neither local authorities nor operators noticed.
Last year the region produced 119 terawatt-hours, a little more than a fifth of French electricity. The Land injected 87 into its grid, against 138 in 2018: more than a third lost in seven years, for two reasons that compounded. The definitive shutdown of German nuclear power in April 2023, then the scheduled end of lignite, brought forward from 2038 to 2030 by the October 2022 agreement between Berlin, Düsseldorf and RWE.
Water drew the map before the atom
Historian Alain Beltran, of Université Paris 1, shows in his work that water drew France’s electrical map long before the atom: the Alps’ “white coal” first, then the 1921 law that launched the development of the Rhône. Nuclear power settled along the same river half a century later, because the water was already there.
That history produced a combination nobody else in Europe has at this scale. Four nuclear plants — Bugey, Saint-Alban, Cruas, Tricastin — run at a steady rate, day and night. The Rhône dams and the large Alpine reservoirs, Tignes or Grand’Maison, supply the flexibility: a dam starts within minutes when demand climbs or the wind drops elsewhere. Even in 2025, a poor year for water, the region delivered 44% of French hydroelectricity and produced 96.5% of its power carbon-free.
The rest of the Union trails well behind. Grand Est, France’s second region at 90 terawatt-hours, on its own already exceeds the former champion. Catalonia, Spain’s leading producing region, does not reach 40. Bełchatów, the giant lignite plant of central Poland, is shutting down unit by unit through 2036.
Two caveats I raise myself
No institution publishes a European ranking of producing territories: my demonstration proceeds by elimination. And German statistics measure power injected into the public grid, not total output. Adding what the chemical and steel industries generate for their own use, the Land approaches a hundred terawatt-hours — some twenty fewer than us.
A title nobody claims
In January, the Region filed a contribution to the public debate on the electricity grid. It sets itself the ambition of “becoming Europe’s first decarbonised region”, without mentioning that its territory already produces more electricity than any other region on the continent. In the same document it presents itself as France’s leading industrial, agricultural and gastronomic region. But not its leading electrical one.
One plain fact remains: Europe’s leading electricity region is now ours, and its output should grow with new renewables and EPR 2. The Rhône, which carries that output, remains a fragile asset exposed to climate change — a tool of production as much as of cooling, as last summer was a reminder.