France sticks to its guns, refuses to table 2030 renewable energy target

By refusing to table a target for 2030, France is failing to implement the EU’s renewable energy directive, the European Commission said on Monday (18 December) as part of its “recommendations” on the country’s draft National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP).

Read the original French story here.

In its report covering the EU27 as a whole, the Commission found that national plans submitted so far would only deliver a 51% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030 compared to 1990, falling short of the EU’s 55% target.

“The 21 draft plans received to date do not, as they stand, enable us to achieve our objectives,” the Commission wrote on X.

In the case of France, the draft NECP submitted by Paris would only achieve a reduction in CO2 emissions of 46.4% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, behind the 47.5% set out in the EU’s Effort Sharing Regulation, the Commission found.

The French plan also only “partially refers to the revised energy and climate targets recently agreed under the Fit for 55 legislative package and the REPowerEU Plan”, the Commission added.

When submitting its updated plan by 30 June 2024 at the latest, France will have to demonstrate “how the existing and planned policies will deliver on the target,” the Commission added.

Focus on renewables

In its report, the Commission singles out France’s approach to renewable energies.

“The draft updated plan does not put forward a contribution towards the EU 2030 renewable energy target,” the Commission notes. Moreover, the draft plan “also fails to address the shortfall to the 2020 target and does not indicate how France intends to close this gap,” it adds.

According to Brussels’ calculations, France needs to achieve at least 44% renewables in its gross final energy consumption in 2030 to sufficiently contribute to the EU target of 42.5% set out in the Renewable Energy Directive, which was updated earlier this year.

Paris, however, sees it differently. In its draft plan, the French government chose to put forward a target for “decarbonised” energy for 2030, which combines nuclear power and renewables.

“We are in dialogue with the Commission to respond to these requests for clarification,” the office of French Energy Transition Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said on Monday.

In any case, this is not what EU legislation provides for, as the Commission is actually asking for a “timeline of the steps leading to the adoption of legislative and non-legislative policies and measures aimed at transposing and implementing the provisions of the [RED] Directive” and to “significantly raise the ambitions”.

The minister’s office replied: “France is very committed to meeting its targets, but like several other EU countries, decarbonisation does not depend on renewables alone,” adding that they believe that their strategy and the EU’s ultimate goal must be decarbonisation.

“Overall, we are sticking to the objective of defossilisation and reduction of gross greenhouse gas emissions,” Pannier-Runacher said ahead of this year’s final Energy Council meeting on Tuesday.

France 'omits' renewable energy target in 2030 energy-climate plan

France’s draft national energy and climate plan (NECP), recently handed in to the European Commission, fails to mention a renewable energy objective for 2030, referring instead to a “decarbonised” energy target incorporating nuclear power, in contradiciton with the EU’s renewable energy directive.

The French argument

France has been repeating the same argument for months and seems to be playing the long game ahead of the European elections in June.

Earlier this year, Paris indeed suggested it could back an EU-wide target of 45% for renewable energies if the objective assigned to each member state was weighted according to the carbon intensity of their electricity mix.

In other words, the national objective on renewables would be lower for countries like France which already have a largely decarbonised electricity mix.

That approach was pushed forward later on when France obtained a derogation from the EU’s renewable hydrogen production targets by virtue of its low-carbon electricity mix.

The key argument presented back then was that the EU’s end objective is to decarbonise hydrogen production, not to produce hydrogen from renewable energy sources.

Similarly, Paris is arguing today that the EU’s end objective is to reduce carbon emissions by 2030, not to increase renewable energy production per se.

“Using the argument of technological neutrality, France seems to be planting its seeds,” said Phuc-Vinh Nguyen, energy policy researcher at the Jacques Delors Institute, a think tank.

“After obtaining a declaration from the European Commission as part of the final negotiations on the RED directive, the next stage in the rocket could be the recognition or consecration of a low-carbon target for gross final energy consumption,” he suggested.

Those intentions were confirmed on Monday by Pannier-Runacher’s office.

Speaking about today’s meeting of the French-led Nuclear Alliance, the minister’s office said the objective was to “send a message to the next European Commission on the importance of adopting a technology-neutral approach to meeting our climate commitments.”

“In other words, an approach based on decarbonisation methods, whether renewable or nuclear, but without any form of distinction,” explained an aide to Pannier-Runacher.

France in talks with EU Commission to avoid renewable energy fines

Paris is in talks with the European Commission to avoid penalties for having missed its 2020 objective under the EU’s renewable energy directive and failing to make up for the shortfall.

[Edited by Frédéric Simon/Nathalie Weatherald]

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