As winter approaches, the announcement should be of interest to RTE customers. The manager of the French electricity network announced, Wednesday, September 28, its intention to return to them more than one billion euros, consequence of the exceptional receipts collected by the person in charge of the French high voltage lines in 2022 under the effect of tensions on the electricity market.
These exceptional revenues come in particular from the access rights paid by importers or exporters of electricity to be able to use the cross-border interconnections operated by RTE, explained the company, owned by EDF (50.1% of the capital), the Caisse des dépôts (29.9%) and CNP Assurances (20%). These revenues depend on the volumes exchanged at the borders and the electricity price differentials between France and its neighbours, which have widened in the context of the European energy crisis, fueled by the consequences of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
Four categories of customers
“Our net surplus, when you take both our revenue surplus and our cost surplus, will be well over a billion euros. We will know the precise final figure once the year is over, but we are more likely to expect 1.5 billion euros or more.told reporters Laurent Martel, Director General of Finance, Purchasing and Risks of RTE. “We will return these sums in full in the first quarter of 2023, in proportion to the sums that customers will have paid us in 2022. For us, this amounts to reimbursing a large third of the tariff that we will have collected from them in 2022. “
While refunds to customers must take place through moderation of annual tariff increases when RTE’s revenue exceeds the estimated amounts retained by the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE), the operator of the electricity transmission network underlined that the application of the current rules would have spread over more than six years the restitution of the surplus observed in 2022. RTE therefore proposed, “in the context of soaring energy prices”to anticipate restitution so that its users benefit from this support from the beginning of 2023, which will be the subject of a public consultation organized by CRE.
RTE has four categories of customers: 170 electricity producers, 380 manufacturers directly connected to the high-voltage line network (steel, metallurgy, heavy chemicals, paper, automotive, rail transport, etc.), 130 distributors who make the link with end consumers and 240 market players (traders and service providers).
“Tariff catch-ups”
“The money will be returned in proportion to the payments we receive in 2022. We anticipate that around 90% of this sum will be returned to distributors, with the rest going to industrial consumers. If the refund was around 1.5 billion euros, 123 million would be returned to industrial consumers early next year”said Mr. Martel.
“For individuals, the effect is less immediate but there will nevertheless be a real benefit”, he continues, “because the distributors (…) face additional costs that will have to be covered by tariff catch-ups in the coming months and years. Restitution (…) will therefore be deducted from future tariff catch-ups which will be imposed on individual consumers”.