Histoire du Service de la production thermique d'Electricite de France. Vol. 1, 1946-1973 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Histoire du Service de la production thermique d’Electricité de France. Vol. 1, 1946–1973 * Robert Fox (bio) Histoire du Service de la production thermique d’Electricité de France. Vol. 1, 1946–1973. By Dominique Larroque. Paris: Association pour l’histoire de l’électricité en France, 1997. Pp. 462; illustrations, figures, tables, notes. From its creation in 1946, as part of the newly nationalized French electrical supply industry, until its disappearance in a major restructuring in 1992, the Service de la production thermique (SPT) was responsible for [End Page 154] France’s traditional (coal-fired and oil-fired) and nuclear power-generating stations. Within the structures of Electricité de France (EDF), it occupied an increasingly important place, accounting for over a quarter of EDF’s workforce by the time of its demise. It also stood as a model to the other services of EDF, notably by securing a tenfold increase in productivity (measured in megawatts per employee) over the quarter of a century or so for which it existed. Such success, as Dominique Larroque’s densely packed and perceptive history shows, was not easily won. The legacy of the war was dismal: the eight-six thermal stations that constituted EDF’s heritage in 1946 were predominantly small, and most of them were showing their age. But the will to modernize, fanned by the first of a series of governmental plans for postwar reconstruction, the plan Monnet, was strong. Visits to the United States by Robert Boudrant, Raymond Giguet, François Torresi, and other senior technical staff showed the way forward. American management skilled in the stimulation, as well as the satisfaction, of demand and power stations in which the integration between the successive stages of production and control were exemplary impressed the French visitors. And the lessons were quickly applied in a process of renewal that gained momentum from 1953. From then on into the 1960s, coal-fired stations rode the crest of a wave. The constancy of the quest for technical and managerial improvement bears witness to a broader will for the rehabilitation of France that leaves those of us used to less planned economies gasping. Between 1958 and 1970, the third, fourth, and fifth plans all placed the modernization of the nation’s energy resources at center stage and made possible a sensitive reaction to changing markets and methods of production. One element in the ferment of these years was the relative decline in the contribution of the Service de la production hydraulique (the subject of a parallel history by Georges Maurin, published in 1995), whose level of production rose far more slowly from the mid-1960s than that of the SPT, after two decades of neck-and-neck rivalry. The years of the third, fourth, and fifth plans also saw the beginning of the aventure nucléaire. First recognized as a major potential source of electricity in the third plan (covering 1958–61), nuclear power was as much a matter of national pride as it was of economic benefit, which in any case, especially in the decade of low oil prices that preceded the crisis of 1973, was uncertain. It also provoked not only tensions between the champions of the different types of reactor but also the need for adjustment between EDF and the powerful national agency responsible for nuclear research and its military and civil exploitation, the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique. On this, Georges Lamiral’s two-volume Chronique de trente années d’équipement nucléaire à Electricité de France (Paris: Association pour l’histoire de l’électricité en France, 1988) offers a richly documented starting point, but there are still loose ends that Dominique Larroque properly leaves to be tied up in a forthcoming volume [End Page 155] on the SPT between 1973 and 1992. Enough is said here, however, to make it unsurprising that the nuclear take-off in France was slow. This was manifestly not an easy history to write. The microstructure of the multiple interfaces between the SPT and EDF, as well as the bigger picture of national and international movements in technology, politics, and the economy make for an inevitable complexity of argument and exposition. But the structuring of...