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Summary – This post presents a synthesis of the results of a project carried out by Yassine Abdelouadoud and coordinated by myself at the PERSEE centre of MINES Paris PSL. In this project we developed a method for assessing the cost of reinforcing the electricity distribution grid to accommodate photovoltaic plants (both at low voltage and at me...

Summary – Do we have too much oil and gas, or should we fear that our reserves will not be sufficient? What I explain here is that we have far too much coal, gas and oil, and that discourses pushing fear about declining reserves are backward-looking. In the case of oil they remain fairly common. They are a way — consciously or not — of shifting ...

Summary – Taking advantage of the success of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book “Sans transition”, I share a few thoughts on the place of technology and of sufficiency in the energy transition. There really are a great many situations in which “both at once” is possible: technology AND sufficiency. That said, the respective shares of technology and su...

Summary – I was invited to write an op-ed on electric vehicles for Mobil’is. Covering this topic in under 4000 words was not easy, but it was instructive. The piece let me restate three things: (i) it is impossible to get anywhere near carbon neutrality in transport without a massive deployment of electric vehicles and the near-disappearance of ...

Summary – An op-ed written in June for Alternatives Economiques that took a while to be published. In it I discuss the past and future constraints on our power system (the “adequacy” question), the well-known loss-of-load criterion, and the recent note from the French nuclear safety authority (ASN), which somewhat shakes up the subject.

Summary – Today we are publishing an article in the journal Energy and Buildings on building energy modelling in France. This is a good opportunity to present here the open source Python simulation tool Building model, which is used in the article to simulate all residential energy consumption of every dwelling in every IRIS district of France. ...

Summary – This text is an op-ed co-written with Patrick Criqui, economist and emeritus research director at CNRS, and Alain Grandjean, economist and chair of the Nicolas Hulot foundation. Energy sufficiency is a major lever, in the short term to deal with this winter’s crisis and in the long term to reach carbon neutrality. But incentive measure...

Summary – Following today’s publication of REPowerEU, the European Commission’s roadmap for ending our dependence on Russian gas, here is a short commentary that will also be published in the newspaper Alternatives Economiques. It is an opportunity to recall two things. First, that this Russian gas is currently a very large source of income for ...

Summary – In a previous article [PostEnergySieves], Yassine Abdelouadoud and I presented the French energy performance certificate (EPC) and discussed its use for assessing the number of energy sieves — the worst-insulated dwellings — in France. We proposed a new estimate of around 7 million sieves, quite different from the official estimate [SD...

Summary – In this article, co-written with Yassine Abdelouadoud, we discuss the role of the French energy performance certificate (DPE, “diagnostic de performance énergétique”) in the energy transition, and in particular the estimates it has made possible of the number of energy sieves — the worst-insulated dwellings. We seek to explain the orig...

An op-ed I am publishing today in the newspaper “alternatives économiques” following the publication of RTE’s scenarios for our future energy mixes out to 2050. My main messages: (1) the real constraint is not economic but rather about the pace of deployment, for every technology. (2) EPR2 reactors must be launched right now, and we should hold ...

In 2018, minister François de Rugy, who had just succeeded Nicolas Hulot, announced that the target for the renewable share of our electricity generation was moving from 32% to 40%. Some see in this today a European takeover of French energy strategy [Leveque 29-09-2021], but it should be recalled that Europe did not invent these targets and tha...

In this post I offer a cross-cutting description of the French and German energy transitions in terms of energy production: biogas, wood, nuclear, intermittent renewable energy (iRE), the power network, hydrogen (as an energy carrier) and heat pumps. For now I set aside essential subjects such as building renovation, sufficiency and the electrif...

This post complements the “energy and capacity” post [PostPrec] but it can be read separately. It is probably even more natural to read this post first. We give a simple, fairly classical formula for computing the levelised cost of electricity. It rests on grouping costs into several categories: investment costs, operation and maintenance costs,...

The purpose of this post is to introduce a simple basis for describing a country's electricity generation mix. That means segmenting generation into broad families: "nuclear", "coal", "gas", "hydro", "solar PV", "wind" or "biomass". The place each of these classes occupies in the mix is summarised by two simple, important and complementary indic...

I wrote a contribution to the public consultation on the "draft long-term strategy to mobilise investment in the renovation of the national stock of residential and commercial buildings, public and private" [1]. This contribution comes in two parts; the second part will come later and will address the question of the thermal renovation of build...

Summary -- In this post I briefly describe the variability of electricity demand, distinguishing several causes and several timescales. In particular I analyse thermosensitivity — the sensitivity of demand to temperature — which is large in France and problematic. I show how this thermosensitivity has evolved since 1996: the amplitude of the phe...