During a press conference this morning, Xavier Pintat, president of the “Fédération nationale des collectivités concédantes et régies” (FNCCR), and Marianne Laigneau, chairwoman of the board of directors of Enedis and president of Think Smartgrids, presented the opportunities offered to local authorities by new smart grid technologies to accelerate their energy transition.
Indeed, Xavier Pintat reminded that, in a context of unprecedented transformation of our electricity system due to the need to accelerate the decarbonization of our energy mix, the FNCCR and Think Smartgrids have begun working together to provide greater support to local authorities wishing to deploy energy transition projects. A smart grids guide has been published by the Think Smartgrids association, in collaboration with the FNCCR and with financial support from ADEME, to reference concrete smart grids use cases that can be readily deployed in local territories.
The FNCCR provides local territories with legal, technical-economic and training support for their projects. The main stakeholders of the smart grid industry, brought together within Think Smartgrids, will be able to put their expertise at the disposal of these projects and help teams in the territories acquire the skills they need.
Marianne Laigneau pointed that, when Think Smartgrids was created in 2015, many smart grid projects were still at the “demonstrator” stage, testing innovations on a small scale. Some energy distribution local authorities (AODE in french) were pioneers in testing these innovations and laying the foundations for them to be scaled up. For instance, the SyDEV’s “Smart Grids Vendée” project, industrialized smart connection offers for renewable energies, and the Syndicat du Morbihan, pioneered the testing of collective self-consumption projects.
Now that a number of smart grid technologies have proved their worth, Think Smartgrids and its members are working to offer local players concrete solutions that can be deployed on a large scale to meet major challenges such as optimizing the deployment of electric vehicle charging infrastructures, developing individual and collective self-consumption projects, and leveraging energy data to reduce consumption and energy bills.
Marianne Laigneau reminded that in March 2022, a study published by the Think Smartgrids association on the growth prospects for the smart grids market was already forecasting a five-fold increase in this market by 2030, driven in particular by electric vehicles and renewable energies. Since then, the energy transition has visibly accelerated: France has passed the milestone of 100,000 charging stations for electric vehicles and 660,000 photovoltaic installations connected to the distribution grid, with exponential growth. The number of individual self-consumption operations has also soared, with 208,000 operations by the end of 2022, compared with 100,000 in March 2021. Collective self-consumption, which increasingly appeals to local authorities, has also risen sharply, from 6 operations in 2018 to 200 in May 2023, and 337 operations in the planning stage.
Finally, Régis Le Drézen, Managing Director of Think Smartgrids, presented a number of smart grid use cases that could already be replicable at an industrial scale. For example, intelligent connection offers (ORI in french) now make it possible to connect renewable energies more quickly and at lower cost to the distribution network, with a possible gain of €90,0000 per MW in return for very occasional limitations on production. The Linky meter and sensors now make it possible to extend these offers to the low-voltage network.
Solar cadastres, for their part, make it possible to forecast the maximum deployment capacity of solar energy in a given area, by combining data from different players. Mr. Le Drézen also spoke about new energy consumption methods, such as collective self-consumption, smart street lighting, which can bring significant economic benefits for local authorities, and the challenges of controlling the recharging of electric vehicles and local authority’s assets such as water treatment plants.
Other use cases and recommendations for their deployment are detailed in the “Guide for widescale deployment of smart grids”, which Think Smartgrids and the FNCCR are collaboratively bringing to the attention of local authorities.