The New Factory. – The Senate adopted at first reading a proposed energy programming law on October 16. Are you going to ensure that this text goes through to the end of its legislative journey?
Olga Givernet. – It was not possible for the government to support the text in its initial form. However, I wanted to give this senatorial initiative a chance by ensuring that the text is consistent with our environmental ambitions and energy sovereignty, which are based on both nuclear power and renewable energies. We worked with the senators in a spirit of consultation and the voted text is much more balanced. It now gives pride of place to renewable energies. This avoids being restricted to nuclear energy alone (the bill does, however, provide for a “predominantly nuclear” electricity mix by 2050, editor’s note). The senators wanted to add an option to study the installation of 10 gigawatts of additional capacity, in addition to the commitment to build six EPR2s by 2026 and eight additional by 2030.
As for offshore wind power, we have made sure to remain balanced between floating and land-based, because we will need both to supply ourselves with electricity. I also worked to readjust the ambitions in terms of biogas injections for electricity production. The senators, for their part, proposed to initiate an experiment to place certain hydroelectric power stations under the authorization regime (as opposed to the concession regime, editor’s note). This raises a lot of questions in relation to the ongoing negotiations with the European Commission on competition issues and I think it is necessary to await the results of the information mission launched by the National Assembly on hydroelectric power stations.
Our current priority remains PPE. It will be the method that results from the programming law, its concrete application and it will allow us to move forward on the subject of the resources and skills necessary for the implementation of our energy strategy. It is the PPE which will make it possible to say what our numerical objective on nuclear power should be and what the financing modalities will be, a question to which the senators are very attached. The consultation on this text, as on the National Low Carbon Strategy which will be presented by Agnès Pannier-Runacher (the Minister of Ecological Transition, editor’s note), will be open from November 2 for a period of six weeks. There will then be compilation work and we are counting on the final presentation of the PPE by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
Isn’t there a need for a specific text for financing new nuclear power?
I don’t think so, but I understand that EDF is asking for guarantees to ensure that there will be no change in strategy. This is an essential question, but we must do things in order. We are first launching the consultation on the PPE, then we will discuss with EDF the estimate for the new reactors before structuring the financing precisely.
Your supervisory minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher declared that her ministry did not have “the means of (son) action» in the 2025 budget and that it “I will shoot
Considering our ecological debt, it is always difficult to be satisfied with our budget, but we are not satisfied with the country’s financial debt either and we must place ourselves in a general context of savings by providing our share of the budget. ‘effort. On the other hand, if we argue that ecological debt is at the same level as financial debt, we should not have one financing the other. Within my scope, I have a global envelope to finance three schemes: social leasing, which we want to maintain, the ecological bonus for the purchase of a less polluting car and the conversion bonus. We will have to rationalize and refocus these systems.
The revision of the national low-carbon hydrogen strategy was presented at the end of 2023 without being officially adopted since. What about it?
We take the subjects in order but we are going to return to that of hydrogen. The question of hydrogen has been somewhat neglected recently, but it is important. I am convinced that hydrogen has great interest, first of all for the decarbonization of industry and for certain heavy transport. On the other hand, I am less convinced by the fact of using electricity from renewable sources to make hydrogen, storing this energy and then releasing it in the form of electricity and installing terminals everywhere like what is made for electrical terminals. We have other, more direct means of storing energy, like batteries.
Source: www.usinenouvelle.com
