When he buys apples, Xavier Blanquer likes to know where they come from. Simple reflex for the planet. Le Breton favors local supply circuits, “to more or less large scopes, depending on production capacities”. For electricity, it’s a bit the same. Like others, since mid-2022, this resident of Guidel (Morbihan) has participated in a collective self-consumption operation.
This November morning, the fifty-year-old meets in front of the city’s technical services building, where trucks come and go to transport trees swept away by storm Ciaran. Thanks to its 140 kilowatt-peak solar panels, the municipal site produces and consumes photovoltaic electricity.
Through a set of accounting entries, twenty-seven households and two businesses in the same industrial zone benefit indirectly. Maximum distance between each other: two kilometers. For their respective suppliers, the amount linked to collective self-consumption must be subtracted from the invoices, that is to say the volume calculated by Enedis, manager of the electricity distribution network, according to each person’s consumption and the production of the power plant. solar.
Time to turn on his cell phone, Xavier Blanquer presents an application set up by the company Enogrid. Diagrams display the “electricity consumption of the day”half hour by half hour, with the share of production ” local ” and that of ” network “. “I kept my consumption pattern. I haven’t tried to adapt to when the sun produces the most electricity.”he concedes.
“In the sense of history”
That being said, installing solar panels on his home is not for tomorrow. “If you put panels, there is the cost of installation, then that of maintenance, otherwise the solar yield goes down”recalls this inspector of classified installations, for the regional directorate of the environment, planning and housing.
In the third quarter of 2023, France has 259 collective self-consumption operations, almost four times more than two years ago. The installed power remains modest, including in relation to individual self-consumption sites: nearly 18 megawatts on one side, more than 1,950 megawatts on the other. In Guidel, as in the majority of cases, engineering relies on a community. Here, the organizing legal entity is called Morbihan Energies, a public establishment for intermunicipal cooperation.
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