Consultation on the energy mix: report by the guarantors of the National Commission for Public Debate

The report aims to restore the main orientations expressed by citizens during the national consultation on the energy mix, which was held from October 2022 to February 2023.

The consultation focused on three main questions:

• How can we adapt our consumption to achieve the objective of carbon neutrality?
• How can we meet our needs for electricity, and more broadly for energy, while ensuring we get out of our dependence on fossil fuels?
• How to plan, implement and finance our energy transition?

It was organized around several highlights proposed by the CNDP:

• First, public meetings organized in each region of France as well as an online consultation of the general public, which made it possible to collect more than 31.000 contributions;
• Then, a "Youth Forum", which brought together 200 young people aged 18 to 35 in Paris, from January 19 to 22, and at the end of which the young people presented their contributions to the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne and the Minister Delegate for Democratic Renewal, government spokesperson, Olivier Véran;
• Finally, the contribution of dozens of masters students specializing in environmental and energy issues.

All citizen contributions expressed during these various events and online have been taken into account.

Several lessons can already be drawn from the report of the CNDP guarantors.

• This consultation made it possible to give youth a voice in an unprecedented way on the energy future of our country.

They were given special consideration, whether it was a matter of the Youth Forum, an exercise which, according to the guarantors, had never been set up in Europe, or the involvement of students from specialized masters in environmental and energy issues.

• The consultation showed an evolution of society on energy issues, the debate having gone beyond the sole prism of the electricity mix which has often prevailed in recent years (in particular on the place of wind turbines and nuclear power).

According to the report, our fellow citizens increasingly believe that the fight against fossil fuels must take precedence in the energy debate. And not that of carbon-free energies between them (renewable energies versus nuclear). This is particularly true among young people, who insist on the need to have a balanced mix to achieve carbon neutrality.

In this regard, the report underlines the request by the students who returned their work to the Minister for Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, and to the Minister for Higher Education and Research, Sylvie Retailleau, to "get out of the 'renewable/nuclear energy opposition'.

• The participants expressed their very strong support for energy sobriety.

Sobriety has been described as a real social issue, to be placed at the heart of the new model that we must invent. A consensus emerges on the importance that sobriety is not confined to an accumulation of individual gestures, but that it is a collective affair that involves all the actors - State, communities, companies...

It should also be noted, on this subject like others, that opinions remain polarized on the question of whether it is appropriate to privilege, for the passage to action, constraint or incitement.

• The participants also expressed the importance of better information and better awareness of the challenges of the energy transition.

Citizens are demanding "clear, transparent and easily accessible information for everyone", whether it be information on their energy consumption to better control it, information on the various existing aids and the conditions for benefiting from them, or again, information on the right things to do.

This request for information is added to a request for training, from an early age, in the right gestures and behaviors to adopt. This was particularly the case during the Youth Forum.

• Another lesson from the report of the guarantors of the consultation is the call for energy transition planning, in particular on the issue of energy production.

The report very clearly indicates that a consensus is emerging on the need to define our energy needs a priori and, consequently, to define precisely for each mode of energy production, a clear direction for the years to come.

The participants want local authorities to play a central role in this planning.

Beyond these main lessons, all of the guidelines expressed in the report made public by the guarantors will be useful and will feed into the future Energy and Climate Planning Act (LPEC). In fact, the government has undertaken to submit a report in response to the main orientations expressed during the consultation before the tabling of the LPEC. This work will be sent to the National Council for Refoundation, as well as to Parliament.

For Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Minister for Energy Transition: “The consultation on our energy future was an important democratic moment which allowed the French to express their opinions on this crucial issue of energy. I would like to thank the guarantors of the National Commission for Public Debate for their report, a source of many lessons which will feed into the future Planning Act on energy and climate, and more broadly, all of our work on sobriety and energy planning. »

For Olivier Véran, Minister Delegate for Democratic Renewal, Government Spokesperson: "This consultation has borne fruit, with more than 30 contributions on the online platform, a Tour de France in each French region, and a deliberative exercise unprecedented in Europe, the Youth Forum, which marked me with the voluntarism and the force of proposals of the new generation. Citizens are waiting for us at the turn, they are demanding and rightly so. It is up to us to be up to it and to come back to them to say transparently how their recommendations will be taken into account in the future Energy and Climate programming bill. This is the principle of duty to follow up, which I vouch for as Minister of Democratic Renewal. My conviction is that there can be no energy and ecological transition without democratic transition! »