Why is it a scandal? The French consumer may pay lower than a UK consumer, but the French taxpayer is paying the difference.
We don't have a surplus of production as such, but we do have the gas-generated capacity, while France has issues with its Nuclear plants.
We're even exporting to Norway.
You can see the figures here.
We even import from Ireland, which seems odd.
Part of the problem is it may be a National Grid, but still the power has to be roughly in the right area of the country. Eg Over a month ago, London was at risk of a blackout, so we had to import extremely expensive electricity from Belgium, even though overall the UK had the spare capacity, just not in the London area.
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Why are we exporting 1GW to Norway at the moment?
They are having problems with lack of water for their Hydroelectric plants.
We generally don't have the geography to do that(it needs 2 reservoirs per plant), but we do have 4 pumped storage plants. They use electricity at night when demand is lower.
Solar isn't going to be much use then.