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France submitted its final national energy-climate plan (NECP) to the European Commission on Wednesday (July 10), ten days after the legal deadline, the plan includes a 2030 target for renewable energy, which the French government had previously resisted.
Each EU country is required by law to submit a plan that sets out how it will meet EU decarbonisation targets by 2030.
In recent months, attention has focused on France’s refusal to specify a target for the ‘share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption by 2030’, as required by the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) adopted in March 2023.
In its draft NECP, France preferred to provide a ‘low-carbon’ target of 58%, which combines both renewable and nuclear power into a single target. The European Commission did not accept this approach.
However the country’s final NECP gives pride of place to renewables, with a ‘final energy consumption’ target of 1,381 terawatt hours (TWh) and a ‘renewable energy consumption’ target of 570 TWh.
Two points stand out in the plan.
Firstly, France has now set itself a power production (TWh) target. Previously the country limited itself to talking about installed capacity (gigawatts, GW) targets.
Secondly, the plan’s renewable target may still not be enough for the Commission.
While the document does not explicitly state the planned share of renewables in 2030, a simple calculation shows that the renewable share would be 41.3% of final energy consumption. According to the Commission, France share of renewables should be at least 44%.
Some in Paris believe that that this may be sufficient for the Commission.
“It’s not enough, but it’s in the EU Commission’s interest for France to make progress,” the French ecologist member of parliament Julie Laernoes, who worked on an energy-climate programming bill (LPEC), that will be used to enshrine the targets in French law, told Euractiv.
The abandonment of the plan’s ‘low-carbon’ objective raises questions about France’s push for more support at an EU-level for nuclear energy – in particular its wish for a ‘low-carbon’ target in any new EU-wide targets for 2040.
The government has yet to comment.
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The post France unexpectedly includes renewables target in its energy and climate plan appeared first on Energy News Beat.
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