Renewable energies: still need to accelerate

2023-09-28 08:00:29

On the occasion of the annual conference of the Renewable Energy Union, many voices were raised to continue the acceleration of these energies, the only solution to reduce the use of fossil fuels by 2035. European sovereignty is now one of the priorities.

The news is timely for the 24th annual conference of the Renewable Energies Union (SER). The day before, President Emmanuel Macron gave the broad outlines of his energy transition policy following an Ecological Planning Council, including the development of renewable energies.

In the coming weeks, the Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, will implement the new French strategy. In the introduction to the conference, she rightly recalled that the ambitions are strong, for example with the desire to double photovoltaic solar and biogas, and quadruple geothermal energy. According to her, an acceleration dynamic is already underway since this year the new photovoltaic capacities on the ground should increase by 50% compared to the gigawatt installed in 2022, and those of onshore wind power should reach 1.2 GW compared to an average of 800-900 MW between 2020 and 2022.

The minister particularly insisted that SER manufacturers structure their sectors in order to collectively meet national objectives. On offshore wind power, it wants a change of scale and method: a process should be initiated with the National Commission for Public Debate to identify new maritime zones, with a view to installing 18 GW off the French coast of by 2035.

Finding European sovereignty

At the European level, the objectives are just as ambitious: achieving at least 42.5% renewable energy in consumption and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. To achieve this, the revision of 75 community laws have been initiated as part of the Green Deal: “This is an unprecedented, historic exercise” recalled Pascal Canfin, MEP. Given the short deadline, efforts must be multiplied, hence, according to him, the need to bring the Stability and Growth Pact into line, the broader mobilization of the Innovation Fund, and the establishment of a real industrial policy to protect European players from international competition.

The issue of sovereignty was in fact on everyone’s lips, faced with the immense export capacities of the Chinese in photovoltaic solar power and soon in onshore wind power. Florence Lambert, CEO of Genvia and president of the SER’s Industry, Jobs and Innovation Commission, recognized that establishing the value chain of these technologies in Europe will take more time than we imagine. It is necessary to combine economic competitiveness and mass production, while maintaining technological differentiation with Asia through innovation at all levels, from upstream technological building blocks to the industrialization of processes. It also calls on equipment manufacturers to act in a concerted manner on several industrial sectors to find synergies, via technological platforms bringing together the different ETIs (industrial-sized companies) concerned.

The need to better control the value chain also concerns raw materials, as indicated by the director of the French Observatory of Mineral Resources for Industrial Sectors (Ofremi). This entity, created less than a year ago, analyzes how all the links might be completed to ensure as much sovereignty as possible. The work is immense, because it affects the capacity to have new mining extractions, refining infrastructures, secondary supplies via recycling. The expert particularly underlined the importance of ensuring that the materials used in products today can be used, once recycled in 10 or 20 years, in the technologies of tomorrow.

Initiative in the building

Even in the building sector, the potential of renewable energies (Renewable Energy) is taken very seriously. A week before the SER conference, a coalition of a dozen stakeholders took advantage of the Low-Carbon Real Estate Show to launch an initiative aimed at “boosting” their development. Among them, we find several real estate companies such as BNP Paribas Real Estate, Icade, the Eiffel Tower company, Espaces régional or La Poste Real Estate. Within three years, they wish to systematize the integration of renewable and recovery energies into their real estate portfolio. The potential is 40 to 70% of a building’s needs which can be covered by these energies. To achieve this, they will rely on an ENRScore benchmark developed by the French Institute for Building Performance, and on a digital cartographic tool from the Sustainable Real Estate Observatory.

An approach that will certainly please Jean-Louis Bal, who received the EnR Trophy during the SER conference. The scientist Jean Jouzel presented him with this prize crowning a life dedicated to renewable energies, notably within Ademe and as president of the SER from 2010 to the end of 2022. “We’re tired of procrastination” declared Jean-Louis Bal, now president of Agir pour le climat, calling for a halt to fossil fuel projects and an end to “Jancovician controversies” to embark on an all-out development of renewable energies.

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