A French mayor has threatened to stop paying electricity bills in his city if the government fails to act to curb the skyrocketing prices.
“It's impossible! How do I find the lacking 1.9 million euros? What services am I supposed to shut down? Should we scrap school meals or have the town hall closed for three days a week?" Jean-Pierre Bosino, mayor of Montataire, said on Monday. "We don't have a war chest, we have to vote for a balanced budget."
Montataire, a commune in the Oise department in northern France, has a population of 13,600 people.
Given that electricity prices jumped from 85 euros to 1,000 euros per MWh last Friday, Bosino fears that next year the municipality will have to spend 2.5 million euros on electricity supplies, instead of 600,000 euros like this year.
Unlike individuals, “local authorities are subject to the market price... Today, it is untenable! We must return to a regulated tariff,” he pleaded.
“Speculation in electricity and gas is expensive for the majority, but profitable for the few,” Bosino continued. “It is not normal that [French energy company] EDF is forced to sell electricity at 50 euros per MWh to its competitors, which costs it 8 billion, which is not enough to maintain power plants. We need to take electricity and gas off the exchange. If the government does nothing, we will no longer pay our bills, and I call on all communities affected by this phenomenon to do the same," he concluded.
"Of course we have to work on this transition, but in any case we will have to continue to light our streets, our schools, make computer services work..."
Bosino also described a 1.5 billion-euro-fund to support local authorities and accelerate the transition to green energy as useless.
"Of course we have to work on this transition, but we will have to keep lighting our streets, our schools, running our computer services," the mayor added.
Le Parisien has previously reported that the wholesale price of electricity in France will increase more than tenfold next year. The newspaper cited the shutdown for maintenance and repair of 32 of the 56 French nuclear power plant reactors and "a reduction in Russian gas exports to Europe" following the launch of Moscow's special operation in Ukraine as being among the reasons for the jump in prices. The newspaper warned that "by next December, the price for 1 MWh may rise to 1,600 euros."