It's relevant because they are making less than what they spend. Amazon did not run its business on 40 year old power plants that were designed to run for just over 30 [1]. All things break down eventually, write-offs exist in business for a reason. The replacement was supposed to be Flamanville 3, but it turned into an embarrassment. How much will it cost to replace 50+ reactors? Do the math. The EDF is not Amazon, it's more like an Uber driver that runs a "profitable" business, that is suddenly out of work because it needs a new car. Cars break down after 200k? Who knew.

"Some" reactors were not down. Half of the fleet was down, and half of that entirely unplanned. Maybe they made a 20 billion hole because they couldn't fix the problem for months and had to fly in welders from the US? [2] ARENH exists for a decade now, and whether it's the right thing or not is for the sake of this discussion entirely irrelevant (I really don't have an opinion, you can argue either way). What's relevant is that it exists, and if you run a business you can't say "well, we only made a loss because of reality". If you are sane, you include that risk into the price and insure yourself of the risk. Once those 100TWh per year caps started getting maxed out a couple years ago it should've been a clear signal they will be in deep shit if something bad eventually happens. And their electricity output has been going down every year for years now to boot.

> Yeah, well, you could also say that the prices were low for the last 20 years because France consistently exported power when its neighbours needed it. Or that Germany's (and other European countries') reliance on gas for power generation contributed heavily to European electricity markets' exposure to Russian gas squeeze. I guess the narrative you subscribe to depends on what you want to believe.

Both of those things can be true, my point was that if you are creating a hole of 1-2 billion per month, you at some point need to plug the hole. Especially if what you're selling you don't have enough. Law of supply and demand? My electricity provider didn't jack up prices the moment the prices started going up, but eventually when it became clear they need to, they did. Same thing for my heating. Otherwise they would be bankrupt because they are not too big to fail. But this was a signal to consumers to be more conscious about how they spend electricity or energy in general.

As for my appliances, the only new one we have is a washing machine. The fridge we inherited from the previous tenants, so I don't really know, but 400kWh is quite a lot for a fridge these days. Even something like 250 would get a very low rating. I was thinking about a new one and you can even find some larger ones at 50kWh per year. It really doesn't take much of an effort. I guess the only thing "modern" households usually do that we don't is tumble drying, but every time I do do it, I mess some clothes up, so I don't like it anyway. I only use my laptop since a couple years, but more for convenience than for saving electricity by avoiding desktop machines.

[1] https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/president-edf-risque-fis...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/welders-wanted-franc...