Xavier Piechaczyk, Chairman of the Board of Electricity Transport Network (RTE), explains why France and Europe must promote local content in the development of their electricity system.
The fact that tens of billions of euros per year must be invested in the electricity system is controversial. What do you think ?
If we combine all investments in France for the electricity system as a whole over the next thirty years, we arrive at an estimate of around 1,000 billion euros, without taking into account the new electrical uses. Or around 35 billion euros per year. At first glance, this can be scary, but this sum remains relatively lower than France’s oil and gas bill which, in 2022, reached 116 billion euros.
Above all, these are investments and not a single expense made with foreign producers. Pointing out the dependencies caused by the development of the electricity network is necessary, but it remains manageable if we carry out the necessary reforms and do so without forgetting the urgency of getting rid of oil and fossil gas.
How to manage social acceptability?
It is indeed not easy to obtain, and electricity networks will not escape it, especially since, between now and 2050, the number of lines will increase by around 20%. We will do our best not to build too many on greenfield sites, but it is to be expected that this will still happen. We have also launched a competition of architects with a view to building a new pylon that is aesthetically different.
In the energy transition, you warn about France’s dependencies. What are they ?
We must think about our sovereignty over raw materials, technologies and industry. We cannot separate the three. On raw materials, this concerns France’s capacity to source minerals that it does not have in its soil. We must then produce and master the technologies that are installed in our energy system without depending on a foreign manufacturer.
Finally, these two points of vigilance are inseparable from having factories on our soil to produce our circuit breakers, our transformers and our cables. If everything is manufactured outside Europe, we are only maintaining a GDP other than ours, knowing that the manufacturing tap can also, at any time, be turned off.
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