A consortium led by EDF Renouvelables was tasked on Monday with building a new fleet off the coast of Contentin by 2031. This is the 8th offshore commercial fleet thus put on track in France, and the 5th awarded to the national electrician.
QUESTION: This park was awarded more than two years after the launch of the call for tenders. France is planning around fifty parks by 2050. How to keep up?
ANSWER : We propose to change the procedures, because if we make a call for tenders every two years calling for between 500 MW and 1 GW of power, we will not go fast enough. So it would be nice to call in more power all at once, both to go faster and to diversify.
And if we call for more power at once, rather than call for tenders after call for tenders, we can also say that a single winner cannot have all the lots, with a clause stipulating, as exists elsewhere, that not everything can be the same. Because it would be a good thing to have the big international players, it would be a shame if they got discouraged.
Q: The tariff for the electricity produced, proposed by the producer to the State, represents 70% of the selection criteria. Today these prices offered by the candidates are very low. Do you see a risk there?
A: Low prices are good news for public finances, provided that this is sustainable for project promoters.
In the case of the Normandy call for tenders, we mobilized a procedure known as +abnormally low offers+, to check that the four offers at low prices were sustainable. And after analysis, we came to the conclusion that yes.
For the future, we would like to have more elements of analysis in the specifications. We want to increase the robustness points of the offers, because we found that several offers were risky, for different reasons, technical or financial.
Q: How to concretely "massify" calls for tenders?
A: It will first be necessary to plan the zones by seafront, and then within the framework of the next energy programming (expected by 2024), decide to call for more power: for example 2, 3 or 4 GW of power, across multiple batches, instead of a 1 GW batch.
But already before, one could also shorten the instruction. Today, the government follows a procedure of +competitive period+: there is first a call to who can compete, then the list of potential competitors, then a discussion with them on the content of the specifications, then the publication of these specifications, and finally the invitation to tender itself. I don't think we need to do that anymore: we could publish specifications directly, which would save us about six months, and this reform could apply as of the next calls for tenders.