2023-07-11 14:02:35
By 2025, France should have one million producers of renewables, of all sizes. This forces us to rethink the electrical network by drawing new lines and reinforcing the installations. “A huge subject”according to the president of the Energy Regulation Commission (CRE), Emmanuelle Wargon, heard in the Senate.
This is the hidden, or rather underground, side of the energy transition. This involves connecting hundreds of renewable energy production sites, or even tens of thousands, to the electricity grid, including individuals who are more likely to install solar panels on the roof every day.
“A huge peak of investments to spend”
A huge challenge for Enedis, the distribution network manager, which plans to devote at least ten billion euros to it by 2040, or 10% of its investment budget. In 2022, it connected 3.8 GW and intends to quickly reach 5 GW on an annual basis.
“On the networks, we are not totally serene, because we have a huge peak of investments to spend”, explained Emmanuelle Wargon, the president of the Energy Regulation Commission (CRE), during a hearing in the Senate on July 5. According to her, these connection issues could “potentially become the blocking factor” of the energy transition.
The self-consumption boom
Demand is exploding everywhere, especially for photovoltaics. In 2021, Enedis made 50,000 connections and 100,000 last year, an amount already reached in the first six months of 2023. In 90% of cases, these are requests made by households.
But a growing number of local authorities, social landlords or companies are also setting up collective self-consumption systems. Photovoltaic panels placed on the roofs of a building or a school, for example, make it possible to supply the surrounding buildings. With soaring electricity prices, it has become a quick fix for lowering bills. At the end of May 2023, Enedis recorded 200 collective self-consumption operations against… six in 2018.
The effect of the renewables acceleration law
Connection requests will further increase with the law for the acceleration of renewables, voted in February, which imposes solar panels on car parks of more than 1,500 m2 and encourages agrivoltaism.
“In urban areas, the networks are generally well sized and there aren’t too many problems. It is more complicated, on the other hand, in rural areas, where it is often necessary to reinforce the lines, in particular to respond to the development of photovoltaics on agricultural sheds”underlines Cédric Boissier, director of the acceleration of renewable energies (ENR) project at Enedis.
Reduce connection times
Because the low and medium voltage network was designed to deliver power to consumers from large production units, thermal, hydroelectric and nuclear, which are directly connected to RTE’s high voltage network. A top-down system of sorts.
Everything changes now with a network that must work in both directions. By 2025, Enedis should reach one million producers connected to its facilities (700,000 today), against a handful ten years ago.
A small revolution.
You have to go fast. The law for accelerating renewables plans to halve connection times in order to reduce them to one month for individuals and one year for large installations. “We are already halfway there”, assures Cédric Boissier, recalling that part of the delays is also due to administrative delays. According to him, a household must wait around 45 days while for wind farms or solar farms, it takes about 18 months.
But this is only an average, because the connection work can be very heavy. It is sometimes necessary to pull lines over twenty or thirty kilometres, cross towns or pass under railway tracks to connect the source substation where the junction between the Enedis network and that of RTE is made. In areas where there is already a lot of ENR, new installations are needed to reduce queues.
Build new equipment
This is the case, for example, in the three departments of the former Picardy region (Somme, Aisne and Oise), which has 330 wind farms. Over the past five years, Enedis has built four new source substations there. Eighteen wind farms are connected to it and there is still capacity for ten others. Insufficient.
“We are going to install five new source substations between 2024 and 2027”, says Véronique Pauly, regional director of Enedis in Picardy. Throughout France, the EDF subsidiary plans to build 80 additional ones (out of 2,300 today) by 2030. All this obviously has a cost.
Because if the connection costs are paid by the producer, the reinforcement of the lines is the responsibility of the network manager. This will inevitably increase the tariff for the use of public electricity networks (Turpe), warned the president of the CRE before the senators, stressing that it was “a huge subject”. Very sensitive too, while electricity bills have already climbed a lot.
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