“The south-west and the Mediterranean rim show the largest declinesobserves Enedis. sutichak / stock.adobe.com
The electricity distribution manager Enedis provided data on the drop in consumption in the territories.
If it is now known that the campaign to reduce energy consumption has borne fruit this winter in France, where have households been the most “sober»? Enedis, the manager of the electricity distribution network, looked into the question and drew a map, accessible on its website.
This document “presents the sobriety effort by department“, explains Enedis, an indicator “calculated by taking the difference between the electricity consumption measured this winter and the electricity consumption of previous years“, erased in particular from temperature differences and confinements of 2020. Note that the map only takes into account the residential sector – and therefore not professionals or businesses –, over the period from October 15 to February 5. The gap is measured against the “previous years“, without further details.
As a result, it is in Lot (-13.9%), Landes (-13.6%) and Aude (-12.8%) that electricity consumption fell the most this winter. Wider, “the south-west and the Mediterranean rim show the most significant declinesobserves Enedis. Logical, because it is in these regions “that we find there the highest rate of electric heating and therefore the highest potential for saving electricity“, explains the manager. There are also a few very economical departments outside these regions, such as the Territoire de Belfort (-11.6%), Isère (-11.3%) and Drôme (-11.2%).
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Ardennes, Moselle and Orne at the other end of the ranking
Conversely, it is in the northern third of France that we find most of the departments where sobriety in electricity has been the least visible. A possible explanation being the fact that gas heating is more widespread there. Even though they appear as the “bad studentsnone of them increased their electricity consumption this winter. In detail, the five departments where consumption fell the least are Ardennes (-3.7%), Moselle (-4.2%), Orne (-4.3%), Pas-de -Calais (-4.4%) and Mayenne (-5%).
Still, all the metropolitan departments have responded to calls for sobriety from the government. An observation also drawn up by RTE, which nevertheless recalls that it “remains difficult to distinguish in this movement the respective parts of chosen sobriety and economic constraintlinked to the rise in electricity prices. At national level, the electricity transmission network operator observes a 9.1% drop in consumption over the last four weeks – corrected for the weather – compared to the average for previous years (2014-2019, excluding the crisis sanitary).