Exactly. Coal is not replacing anything. That would imply a growing amount of coal plants. The opposite is true in even the most pro coal markets (like the US).
Interestingly, this overview excludes solar and wind. Especially solar would be popular in the sense that there are loads of small domestic deployments and comparatively small plants that collectively add up to a lot of production with more coming online all the time. Most of the country gets a decent amount of sun throughout the year and like pretty much anywhere else, the French have been deploying loads of solar panels on their roofs. Also they've been growing their wind deployment in the order of about 1GW/year in recent years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_France
Basically, what the article conveniently also overlooks is that France actually exports more energy than it imports: it produces more than it consumes. The numbers in this article are a bit out of date but paint a clear picture of imports decreasing year over year until 2015 and actually being smaller than exports in any case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France. I did not find any more recent number but I have no reason to assume that this trend turned around in the last 6 years (the opposite actually).
Mostly imports and exports are driven by capacity and energy cost. Nuclear is not exactly known to be cheap, so exporting over capacity with tiny margins (or at a loss) in a market increasingly dominated by new, clean, cheap energy sources is less attractive than shutting down what was probably a plant with a comparatively high operational overhead. I'm guessing more plants will follow in the next years for exactly the same reason.
France still has a lot of nuclear plants left (and of course hardly any coal at all). The one discussed in the article was the smallest one in any case according to this overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Fran....
Interestingly, this overview excludes solar and wind. Especially solar would be popular in the sense that there are loads of small domestic deployments and comparatively small plants that collectively add up to a lot of production with more coming online all the time. Most of the country gets a decent amount of sun throughout the year and like pretty much anywhere else, the French have been deploying loads of solar panels on their roofs. Also they've been growing their wind deployment in the order of about 1GW/year in recent years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_France
Basically, what the article conveniently also overlooks is that France actually exports more energy than it imports: it produces more than it consumes. The numbers in this article are a bit out of date but paint a clear picture of imports decreasing year over year until 2015 and actually being smaller than exports in any case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France. I did not find any more recent number but I have no reason to assume that this trend turned around in the last 6 years (the opposite actually).
Mostly imports and exports are driven by capacity and energy cost. Nuclear is not exactly known to be cheap, so exporting over capacity with tiny margins (or at a loss) in a market increasingly dominated by new, clean, cheap energy sources is less attractive than shutting down what was probably a plant with a comparatively high operational overhead. I'm guessing more plants will follow in the next years for exactly the same reason.