Marcel Boiteux

Marcel Boiteux was a French economist and engineer who became one of the central figures in building France's nuclear powered electricity system. Born in Niort in 1922, he joined the state utility Electricite de France in 1949 and remained there for his entire career, serving as its director from 1967 to 1987. In that role he was a principal architect of the French nuclear power program, which eventually built 61 reactors and gave France one of the lowest carbon electricity sectors in Europe. Boiteux is also known for developing and applying marginal cost pricing to electricity, an economic approach that shaped how the utility priced power for industrial and household consumers. He was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1992 and lived to the age of 101, dying in 2023.