Marcel Boiteux Was Right

On 6 September 2023, Marcel Boiteux died at the age of 101. As chairman of EDF for 20 years and a member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 30 (and at one point its president), his was a voice that was heeded and respected in the energy sector. He even lent his name to a prize awarded annually by the Association of Energy Economists. In this ‘Future of Yesteryear’ article, Lionel Taccoen pays tribute to him, reminding us how far-sighted it was of him to warn our readers in 2007 against too much blind faith being put in free-market thinking by the European authorities when they decided to open up the electricity market to competition. Returning to the arguments advanced by Boiteux in his article, Taccoen stresses their current relevance (reinforced by the various crises afflicting Europe and the world over the last four years), writing that ‘Marcel Boiteux was right’. He was, perhaps, too far ahead of his time, but his experience at the helm of EDF had shown him that electricity wasn’t a commodity like any other, and that the public utilities and electricity tariffs would not be well served — far from it — by deregulation. Users will probably continue for many years yet to pay the price for this unfortunate reform of the electricity market.