A response to the “end of abundance” described by the Head of State. Wednesday, November 2, arrives in the Senate, in public session, the bill aimed at accelerating renewable energies (ENR). ” We were going to live for all eternity with an energy that was not too expensive and that we controlled. The times have changed “had supported Emmanuel Macron in Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique), on September 22, promising to go twice as fast to develop offshore wind power. There is an urgent need, he urged, to make up for the considerable delay of France and to get out of dependence on Russian gas, used by Vladimir Putin as a weapon of war.
Will stewardship follow? Behind the scenes of the executive, the priority does not appear so obvious. Officially, the government is negotiating hard with all political sensitivities. The Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, has been consulting all the groups since the summer. “It’s still appointments on the margins”nuance the leader of the environmental deputies, Cyrielle Chatelain. “She didn’t even try to convince us, but to explain to us how we should think”criticizes the deputy Les Républicains (LR) of Haut-Rhin Raphaël Schellenberger.
The government has few illusions about the involvement of the right, which is holding back with four irons a month before the LR party congress. ” If they think that renewable energies will compensate for the deindustrialization of the nuclear sector, they are completely wrong”, pings MP Annie Genevard, acting president of LR. The reluctance of the right in the Assembly is proving harsher than that of the Senate, while the senatorial right has already offered a taste of heated debates at the Luxembourg Palace.
An agreement with the left?
Two amendments introduced in committee tipped the left towards the rejection of the text: a right of veto for mayors, allowing any city councilor in the vicinity of an ENR project to oppose it, and the ban on setting up wind turbines less than 40 km from the coast, effectively excluding projects off the Channel and the Mediterranean. ” This would reduce any ambition for offshore wind turbines in France to zero”, points out the chairman of the sustainable development committee in the Assembly, Jean-Marc Zulesi (Renaissance). Dispossessed of its initial ambition, the government will endeavor to restore, in the debates in session, the spirit of the project for ” helm “.
It will still be necessary to reach an agreement with the left, we whisper to Matignon. And, in particular, with the deputies of the New Popular, Ecological and Social Union (Nupes). “We would have a majority that would be built on the left”, hopes for an adviser to Agnès Pannier-Runacher. The relative majority will need to add around thirty votes or abstentions from other groups. Or three quarters of the socialist and environmentalist votes… A challenge, while Emmanuel Macron favored the alliance with the right.
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