France unveils draft ‘energy sovereignty bill’, with emphasis on nuclear

France’s main energy priorities for 2030 largely promote nuclear power as a way of ditching fossil fuels while failing to mention the EU’s renewable energy targets.

Read the original French article here.

The “draft bill on energy sovereignty”, which could still change before its final presentation in the coming weeks, lays out France’s energy objectives for 2030.

For now, it fails to address the targets set out in the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive, adopted last year, which mandates EU member states to collectively achieve a 42.5% share of renewables in final energy consumption – which means at least 44% in France, according to Brussels’ calculations.

Article 1 of the draft bill even deletes existing targets for renewable electricity from the French Energy Code, with no new provisions to transpose the latest EU text.

Asked about this failure to comply with EU rules, French officials dismissed the notion that Paris was backtracking on its renewable energy commitments.

“Reaching an objective and defining a target are two different things,” said the office of Energy Transition Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher on Monday (8 January).

One official said it was “strictly untrue to say that we have no renewable energy target in this text”.

“The draft bill mentions renewable energies and gives them a crucial role, that of a keystone: Once we have laid all the foundations of the existing sectors [nuclear, etc.], renewables provide the last mile,” the official explained.

Pannier-Runacher’s office also pointed out that renewable targets are included in the French energy-climate strategy, unveiled at the end of September.

The energy-climate strategy does indeed include targets for electricity production from renewable sources by 2030 and 2035, which will be included in the French Multiannual Energy Programme (MEP).

However, according to environmental lawyer Arnaud Gossement, such an argument is actually “fragile” because the MEP is a regulatory text which has “a legal value inferior to that of the law”. In fact, the Energy Code stipulates that targets for the development of renewable energy production and consumption must be set into law.

Another reason, according to the lawyer, is that the Multiannual Energy Programme must reflect the priorities defined in the law. “If the law no longer includes quantified targets for the development of electrical renewable energy, it will be difficult for the MEP to consider this development as a priority,” added Gossement.

France pushing for decarbonisation target at EU level

In addition, the targets formulated in the French energy-climate strategy are still not expressed as a percentage of final energy consumption, as required by the EU’s directive on renewables.

In other words, the draft legislation reflects France’s push to introduce “decarbonisation targets” at the EU level that take account of nuclear production, rather than renewable energy targets.

“We consider that our strategy and final objective [at the EU level] must be one of decarbonisation,” Pannier-Runacher’s office said in December, after the European Commission had issued its recommendations on France’s National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP).

In this respect, Paris prefers to set a percentage target for “decarbonised energy” rather than renewable energy, Pannier-Runacher’s office said at the time, arguing that renewable production “is subject to uncertainties” linked to weather conditions.

Still, the Commission’s recommendations insist that France “significantly raise its ambitions” in terms of renewable energies in its final NECP, which must be submitted by June.

Meanwhile, the government appears to be pushing ahead with its plans for Europe’s 2040 climate targets, which the European Commission is due to unveil on 6 February.

In this regard, France, along with 10 other EU states that now form part of a nuclear alliance, intends to press for the 2040 targets to focus on low-carbon energy rather than renewables.

To pursue these ambitions, Pannier-Runacher will travel to Prague on Monday and Tuesday (8 and 9 January) to continue the talks.

Her office is “counting heavily on Belgium”, which holds the six-month rotating presidency of the EU Council until 30 June 2024, “to continue the momentum on technological neutrality established under previous EU Council presidencies”.

A meeting between Pannier-Runacher and her Belgian counterpart, Tinne Van der Straeten, is planned in the coming weeks, the French minister’s office added.

> Read the draft bill (in French) below :

[Edited by Frédéric Simon/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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