The French Academy of Technologies warns of major weaknesses in the multi-year energy program for achieving carbon neutrality.

An energy transition serving three priorities: environment, society, economy

The environmental objective of reducing emissions must be combined with, on the one hand, a social objective to guarantee for all the availability of abundant, cheap and economical energy, and on the other hand to ensure the competitiveness of the French economy and its sovereignty, including the production in France and Europe of the components and services necessary for decarbonization.

Urgent adjustments to PPE 3 and SNBC 3

While the multi-year energy program (PPE 3) and the national low-carbon strategy (SNBC 3) are being finalized, the Academy warns that their horizon is too short to aim for the ambitions of 2050.

It identifies several major weaknesses in PPE 3 that need to be addressed, including:

• For France, which already has almost completely decarbonized electricity, the three essential challenges are 1) decarbonizing uses, 2) prepared, chosen and shared energy sobriety, 3) controlled growth of decarbonized energies (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biomass and geothermal)
• Decarbonizing usage will be the key to success, with three main challenges: transport, the residential and service sectors, and industry.
  • We need to stimulate the supply of affordable electric vehicles and organize the fast charging network for light commercial vehicles and heavy goods vehicles.
  • Building renovation needs to be industrialized and a specific project management service needs to be put in place for clients.
  • We need to give industry the means to decarbonize competitively with affordable electricity, access to biogas and the development of CO2 capture.
• The electricity mix must take into account the full costs of the different energy sources and their impact on the electricity system (production, but also storage, network stability, security of production and its supply of materials, etc.).
• The availability of biomass for producing heat and biogas is greatly overestimated: its use should be primarily reserved for sectors that are most difficult to decarbonize.
• Faced with the reduction of the natural carbon sink (soils and forests) due to global warming, it is necessary to develop CO2 capture technologies to enable the absorption, storage or use of emissions from sectors that are not or are difficult to decarbonize: cement production, fertilizers, steel, chemical industry, livestock farming, etc.

Rethinking the overall framework of the energy transition

These specific actions [as well as many others developed in the opinion] are part of a more general framework.

• To encourage energy sobriety and efficiency, we must fundamentally rethink energy taxation by basing it on the price of the tonne of carbon avoided: the deep anomalies in taxation between fossil fuels (gas in particular) and decarbonized energies must be corrected.
• European energy policy needs to be adjusted to treat all decarbonized energy sources, including nuclear energy, in the same way.
• The energy transition presents an opportunity for industrialization and reindustrialization. It will require much stronger border protection than the European adjustment mechanism, which is expected to apply to a limited number of semi-finished products. It will also have to take into account the current dependence on certain critical materials.

Carbon neutrality: a demanding objective to be transformed into a development opportunity

Achieving carbon neutrality represents a considerable challenge, requiring immediate efforts and innovations for a realistic and ambitious energy policy that we must provide the means for, but also a tremendous opportunity for development and resilience for France, provided that it is made a collective, coherent and sustainable project.

The full review is available here.

Illustrative image of the article via Depositphotos.com.