France: the live status of the French electricity grid
France runs Europe's most nuclear-heavy grid - over half its generation typically comes from RTE's 56 reactors - and is the continent's biggest electricity exporter, thanks to that spare nuclear capacity. It sits inside the Continental Europe synchronous area coordinated by ENTSO-E, and connects to Great Britain directly through three subsea interconnectors: IFA, IFA2 and ElecLink. Demand, generation, day-ahead price and generation mix below are live from the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform.
- Data as of
- Loading live data…
- Day-ahead price
- €78.40/MWh
- Demand
- 54.2GW
- Generation
- 58.6GW
Illustrative figures in the rough range of France's actual totals, not a live reading. Each figure shows an illustrative trend over the last 3 hours.
Generation mix right now
Illustrative figures - see data sources.
| Source | GW | % |
|---|---|---|
| Nuclear | 39.3 | 67.1 |
| Renewables | 15.8 | 27.0 |
| Hydro | 6.4 | 10.9 |
| Wind | 5.9 | 10.0 |
| Solar | 3.5 | 6.0 |
| Fossil fuels | 2.3 | 4.0 |
| Gas | 2.3 | 4.0 |
| Other & storage | 1.2 | 2.0 |
Nuclear's roughly 55-60% baseload share is the defining feature of France's grid - one of the lowest-carbon large grids in the world as a result.
Generation by source right now, ranked highest to lowest.
Generation mix over the last 24 hours
Renewable (wind, solar, hydro, biomass), nuclear, fossil and other, from the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform.
History
Choose a time range to see real recorded demand, generation and day-ahead price over time, from the ENTSO-E Transparency Platform.
Demand
Generation
Day-ahead price
About the French grid
RTE (Réseau de Transport d'Électricité) operates France's transmission grid, part of the Continental Europe synchronous area alongside Germany, Spain, Italy and most of the rest of mainland Europe - all locked to the same 50Hz frequency and trading through coupled day-ahead markets. France's 56 nuclear reactors, mostly built in a concentrated programme through the 1980s, give it the highest share of nuclear generation of any major grid worldwide, and routinely make it Europe's largest net electricity exporter.
That nuclear baseload is complemented by significant hydro capacity (concentrated in the Alps and Pyrenees, providing fast-responding flexibility that nuclear itself can't), a growing wind and solar fleet, and a small, shrinking fossil-fuel fleet used mainly to cover winter demand peaks and occasional nuclear outages. France connects to Great Britain via three subsea interconnectors - IFA (opened 1986, one of the first international power links anywhere), IFA2 (2021) and ElecLink (2022, routed through the Channel Tunnel) - together capable of moving several gigawatts in either direction depending on relative prices and demand.
Context
- Nuclear share of generation~65-70% in a typical year
- Number of operating reactors57, across 18 sites
- Approx. winter demand record~102GW - February 2012
- Net electricity exporterMost years since the 1980s
Approximate nuclear share of French generation by year - dipped in 2022 due to reactor maintenance and corrosion inspections, recovering since.
Figures are approximate, gathered from public RTE/ENTSO-E reporting rather than a long-run historical feed. Last checked: 23 August 2026.
Data sources for France
The Elexon Insights Solution, NESO Data Portal and Carbon Intensity API that power the Great Britain pages are GB-specific and don't cover France, so this page draws on a different source instead:
- ENTSO-E Transparency Platform - the pan-European grid data hub, required by EU regulation for every connected TSO (RTE included) to publish to. Powers demand, generation, day-ahead price, the generation mix, the 24-hour mix chart and the History section above, all via France's own bidding zone. Requires the site operator's own free API token, obtained through a short registration process - shows "not enough recorded history yet" rather than a placeholder figure if one isn't set or ingestion hasn't run yet.
Two figures aren't shown on this page at all: ENTSO-E doesn't publish emissions intensity (g/kWh), and its generation-per-type data doesn't include cross-border physical flow (reading that out per-interconnector - IFA/IFA2/ElecLink individually - would need a separate query this page doesn't make), so rather than show a permanently illustrative placeholder for either, they're left out until a real source exists. See the sitewide data sources page for how this compares to the other pages.