Électricité de France

Électricité de France, known universally as EDF, is a French multinational electric utility company created on April 8, 1946, by a law nationalizing around 1,200 private electricity companies. The founder, Marcel Paul, then Communist Minister of Industrial Production, drove the merger of fragmented regional utilities into a single state-owned monopoly tasked with rebuilding France's energy infrastructure after World War II. EDF became central to the country's post-war economic boom, the Trente Glorieuses, and a symbol of French industrial modernization.

Today EDF is one of the world's largest electric utilities, operating over 120 GW of generation capacity and reporting €139.7 billion in revenue in 2023. Its fleet of 56 active pressurized water nuclear reactors across 18 French sites forms the backbone of the country's low-carbon electricity supply. The company also generates power from hydro, solar, wind, and fossil fuels, and operates transmission (RTE) and distribution (Enedis) networks. International subsidiaries include EDF Energy (UK), Edison (Italy), and EDF Renewables, with a presence in over 20 countries.

EDF was partially privatized in 2004, with the French government retaining 84% equity. Years of underinvestment, reactor outages due to stress corrosion cracking discovered in 2021–2022, and the global energy crisis led the state to fully renationalize the company, completing the buyout of minority shareholders on June 8, 2023, for about €5 billion. President Macron's 2022 nuclear renaissance plan calls for building six EPR2 reactors (with options for eight more), starting at Penly, while the Flamanville EPR reactor finally entered service in 2024 after 17 years of construction and a budget that ballooned from €3.3 billion to over €13 billion.[edit]