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 measures have to be put in place, and above all we have to think about how the constraints and the benefits this sufficiency will generate are shared.
Introduction
Sufficiency is on everyone’s lips. The government is asking the French to use less heating this winter, industrial demand destruction is already under way, and the electricity transmission system operator keeps intervening around its EcoWatt crisis-management system. More discreetly and more recently, even energy companies such as TotalEnergies and Engie are offering their customers bonuses if they consume less. What is at stake around sufficiency, for these energy companies as for citizens; what is at stake in these bonuses; and should they not be discussed in the public debate?
Next winter France will enter a situation without precedent since 1956: barring very mild temperatures, the public authorities will have to introduce coercive measures to reduce French electricity consumption. This exceptional situation is due to three concurrent adverse factors:
- the sharp reduction in Russian gas deliveries, which raises the cost and limits the use of gas-fired power plants;
- an unprecedented unavailability of the nuclear fleet, caused by the combination of a wave of maintenance work and the discovery of a stress corrosion problem affecting a dozen of the 56 reactors in operation;
- this summer's historic drought, which greatly reduced the generation and storage capacity of the hydroelectric system.
Electricity market prices for next winter are at levels never reached before, above €1000/MWh, i.e. 10 times the pre-crisis prices. These very high prices reflect what some consumers, industrial ones in particular, are prepared to pay to avoid a supply interruption. By contrast, the regulated retail tariff for households, computed from average generation costs and capped by the so-called “tariff shield” measures, has risen little: +7% between 2020 and 2022.
Despite this, energy sufficiency — in the sense of limiting the need for energy services — is still barely used. And yet the potential is there: if 80% of households limited their heating set point to 19°C, that would save 12 TWh of electricity, the equivalent of 5 nuclear reactors over the winter. And the electricity-saving potentials are just as large for domestic hot water (12 TWh) and household appliances (20 TWh).
Energy sufficiency, a necessary building block of the energy transition
Like it or not, energy will never again be as abundant as it has been until now. Studies by RTE and Ademe in particular show that carbon neutrality cannot be reached without a major sufficiency effort: the lead times for developing nuclear capacity, together with the constraints on the pace of renewable deployment, limit how fast low-carbon energy production can ramp up. Falling consumption will first have to rely on better energy efficiency, but its deployment will remain limited between now and this winter. The second lever is sufficiency: a shift towards energy-sober behaviour can be very fast, if the incentive is strong enough.
Energy sufficiency to ease the external constraint
To meet electricity demand, gas-fired plants will have to run for much of the winter. Any drop in electricity consumption will therefore reduce gas imports. Before the crisis, these already represented €5 billion for France. Over 2022, the annual cost of gas imports is expected to soar above €50 billion. If French households fully exploited their sufficiency potential, that would mean a saving of €9 billion — enough to create many jobs.
Energy sufficiency is good for purchasing power
Setting aside the energy-poor, who are already forced to limit their consumption, a household following good practices can cut its electricity use by 10% to 20%. That represents an average saving of €100 to €200 on the bill. The supplier, for its part, can either avoid very costly purchases on the wholesale market or, if it has already secured its supply, sell the saved electricity at a price 10 times higher than the one offered to households. The saving for the supplier is between €500 and €1000 per household over the winter. These values can be higher still if consumption falls most during the hours when the power system is under strain.
But what redistribution?
That raises the question of how this saving is redistributed to consumers. As an example, TotalEnergies is offering a €120 bonus to customers who cut their consumption by 20% relative to the previous winter. Is that amount commensurate with what is at stake? Should customers be paid directly for their sufficiency effort, thereby widening the gap between those who can easily reduce their consumption and those who are already unable to heat their homes properly? Should we not instead ask suppliers to hand back a substantial share of these savings to fund transition support for the energy-poor (renovations, subsidies for efficient equipment, etc.)?
Energy sufficiency is a major lever, in the short term to deal with this winter’s crisis and in the long term to make carbon neutrality achievable. But a communication effort will not be enough for it to develop at scale. Strong incentives must be put in place — or rather, strong motivation through solidarity: let the efforts of those who can afford them be put at the service of those in difficulty.