Attac FranceCitizen action Producing citizen renewable energy is no picnic
From Copenhagen to Mâcon
Our goal was to make a concrete contribution to the production of renewable energy. Initially, in 2013, we took action on the issue of urban heating in Mâcon, which had a number of disadvantages: pollutant (fuel) - a prefectural order had given formal notice to the operator to comply with pollution standards -, supplied by a fossil fuel, and, icing on the cake, 30% more expensive than the average French district heating system. We succeeded in putting this question at the center of the municipal campaign which was beginning. Since 2018, a new wood-fired boiler has served 9,500 homes and communities.
In 2013, we started to take an interest in wind power. The commissioning in 2014 of the first citizen wind farm in Béganne in Brittany gave us a boost, but we were quickly confronted with the rise in power of anti-wind farms, often exploited by heritage defenders (and especially their own) and sometimes by far-right activists. We were also interested in small (even micro) hydraulics, but the elevations in the Mâconnais are insufficient to make this type of investment profitable.
After the abandonment of the last wind project that we supported, in November 2016, we decided to devote ourselves to photovoltaics, a mature energy that is more accepted by the general public (at least for rooftop installations). In 2017, we chose to join the network of village power stations, launched in 2010 in Rhône-Alpes and which was experiencing strong growth.
In January 2018, ten founding members invested and created Centrales Villages Soleil Sud Bourgogne (CVSSB), a simplified joint stock company (SAS) which covers the territories of three EPCIs including Mâconnais Beaujolais Agglomération.
The Village Centers model is based on a company (SAS or SCIC) managed by volunteers on a territory defined in the statutes, which generally covers an EPCI or a group of municipalities. The Village Power Plants rent roofs from private or public owners and take charge of the entire implementation of a photovoltaic installation: feasibility studies, request for connection to Enedis, search for installers, monitoring of works, maintenance and monitoring of operation during the 20 years that the agreement lasts (lease or temporary occupation agreement) with the owner of the roof, and electricity produced resold to EDF (or Enercoop) with the application of a regulated tariff , which remains the same for 20 years, but whose tariff for new installations decreases every quarter.
In general, investments are 20% financed by member subscriptions and 80% by bank loan. The economic model generated margins in the early 2010s, but at the end of the decade, the margins are very low even if the model is robust, since for 20 years the revenues are almost guaranteed and cover the initial investments. But with the evolution of the feed-in tariff, the margins are low to finance new investments. It is necessary to relaunch the subscriptions to continue the investments. The search for new members occupied us in 2018 and 2019 and we are now 90 members for €142,000 in capital. Unfortunately, the pandemic has held us back in our tracks and we have hardly had any new members. We have abandoned this research in favor of that of new roofs to be equipped so as not to freeze our capital unnecessarily.
Two other aspects characterize our model: we are strongly established locally in our territory, we have established partnerships with certain local authorities, our members are mostly from this territory, and our suppliers (installers, accountants, notaries, etc. .) are local. Finally, our model is highly secure: insurance, notarized leases, daily production monitoring (by volunteers), maintenance contracts, etc. On the other hand, we are not insured against climate change, and this year 2021 worries us greatly due to its low level of sunshine.
At the end of 2018, we commissioned two 9 kWp [1] photovoltaic installations (approximately 50 m2 of panels) on two private roofs and two others at the start of 2019, one on a private and one on the municipal workshops of a small town in the Mâconnais: our first (and for the moment only...) batch of installations.
During 2018, as we were finalizing this batch, we understood with the entire network of Village Centers that we had to change our model: develop larger installations to balance our accounts. But we wanted to start quickly to show our ability to do so. Having visibility very quickly was important, and for that it was necessary to bring these first four projects to fruition. The decision was relevant, it is on these first achievements that we were able to raise the capital of the company.
We therefore, from the end of 2018, directed our prospection of new roofs towards installations of 36 (approximately 200 m2) to 100 kWp (approximately 600 m2 ).
This development has changed our practices enormously: from looking for well-oriented private roofs, we are moving to that of medium and large roofs that belong more to legal persons: community buildings, businesses, supermarkets, farms, etc. .
Difficulties specific to our territory
Unlike other regions, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté does not support citizen projects like ours, at least not those specializing in photovoltaics . In our region, there is only the Etincelle program run by Coopawatt, which has given us moral support. But financially, there is no aid for studies or investment and, given our level of sunshine compared to the regions further south, it is more difficult to balance our accounts. The village centers of Alsace are strongly supported by their region.
The second difficulty is that, for the past two years, a French building architect (ABF) has been prescribing a red-brown color on the photovoltaic panels in the protection zones, which represents an additional cost of 30% in investment: we we therefore avoid projects in these protection perimeters, which necessarily reduces the potential.
The third difficulty is that the two largest towns in the sector, Mâcon and Charnay-lès-Mâcon, both have a Local Urban Plan which requires photovoltaics to be integrated into buildings. Many urban planning documents have introduced this requirement, often at the initiative of the ABF. However, only a trained eye can see at 30 m whether the panels are integrated into the roof or not. And integration into the building has several drawbacks: the covering elements (tiles, etc.) are removed and the panels provide watertightness, hence frequent disputes. In addition, a panel that is not ventilated by its interior face produces less than a panel installed on top of it, finally, the installation costs more.
Large roofs create new obstacles
The first is linked to the fact that large roofs are less numerous than small ones, which raises the question of prospecting roofs. Our territory covers 100 municipalities and so far, our research has been based either on the proposals made to us (often by local authorities), or on roofs that we identify ourselves during our travels on our territory. There are tools, such as solar cadastres, which would allow systematic but too time-consuming prospecting. Often, the proposals made to us must be discarded because they do not meet our many selection criteria. And we are having a lot of difficulty in finalizing with their owner the interesting roofs that we have identified. We currently have more than 600 roofs in our file that have been pre-analyzed (remember that the seven active members of the CVSSB management board are all volunteers and not all retirees).
The second obstacle relates to the connection of the installation. Enedis (formerly ERDF) has set up pricing that penalizes large installations to the benefit of small ones: the connection cost for a small installation (9 kWp and less) is a flat rate of around €1,500, regardless of the nature of the connection, i.e. whether or not there is a need for an extension (additional work). Above this power, Enedis draws up a connection proposal whose cost is proportional to the characteristics of the connection, and as the injected power is higher, it is sometimes necessary to connect to a more distant substation, or even to change the substation to a more powerful one. On the estimated amount of the works, Enedis has applied a 40% reduction since 2008 financed by the TURPE (tariff for the use of public electricity networks paid by users of the electricity networks). The “climate and resilience” law will increase the reduction from 40 to 60% for installations of less than 500 kW.
On one of our current projects for a power of 100 kWp, the cost requested by Enedis is €35,000. The installed power still makes it possible to financially balance this project, but sometimes it is not possible. What further complicates matters is Enedis' refusal to quantify the cost of the work. As long as the connection request has not been submitted, we only have a color code from "green" to "red": red is prohibited, green is often fixed, but yellow can range from a few thousand to several tens of thousands of euros. We can understand that Enedis, which is already struggling to respond to connection requests within the regulatory deadlines, limits requests "to see", but the result is that here too we are ruling out projects that are not "green". .
Structural issues also penalize these large projects. The building was generally not designed to receive an overload of 200 to 600 m2 of photovoltaic panels. It is therefore necessary to carry out a structural study to identify the necessary reinforcement works. And it is difficult for us to find a local structural design office at a reasonable cost.
Recently, we have been faced with another difficulty: local authorities are starting to want to develop photovoltaic installations themselves, rather than entrusting their roofs to a corporate citizen like ours. They are motivated by state subsidies linked to the recovery plan which offer them the opportunity to equip themselves with photovoltaics as part of energy renovation works, in other words these are still roofs that we will not be equipping. We consider that the objective of developing photovoltaics on the territory has been achieved, but, after four years of developing our skills, we still have doubts about their ability to carry out these projects without specialized assistance. For small municipalities, carrying out these projects without help, directly with installers and ensuring a quality result, seems difficult to us.
Finally, let’s finish with one aspect of government regulatory policy. This has taken irrelevant decisions as photovoltaics have developed. The introduction of the regulated tariff for the purchase of electricity in 2000, in an open window up to 100 kWp and without economic or civic conditions, has enabled unscrupulous installers to carry out installations that are sources of claims with enormous margins. Subsidies granted by local authorities have led to an increase in installation prices, with the subsidy only benefiting the installer. These deviations led to the adoption of a moratorium in December 2010 suspending the purchase obligation for three months. This moratorium had considerable deleterious effects on the photovoltaic panel production sector, which was just beginning to take shape in France: currently, the cost of French panels is much higher than that of Asian panels, even taking into account transport costs. In July 2020, the State announced a new text which extended the open window up to the power of 500 kWp. This niche was covered until now by calls for tenders that were very difficult for companies like ours to access. The extension of the open counter is therefore very positive and has raised many expectations and encouraged many projects (2,000 are pending in France, one for CVSSB). But the implementing decree has still not been released. First announced for January 2021, then for June, then... for September 2021. Our country has difficulty adopting support measures for the sector and these rarely favor small energy production cooperatives.
How to bounce back from these difficulties?
When we were faced with the path strewn with pitfalls represented by the finalization of our Lot 2 (initially lot 2019, then 2020, 2021, etc.), we have thought about making our offer more attractive. Several avenues are possible: pay the rent to the owner in one go at commissioning, offer to install an educational panel visualizing the production of the installation, convert the rent into the installation of panels to self-produce electricity that the owner will be able to consume, develop original co-investment models, etc.
We are in the process of installing a 36 kWp plant on a building belonging to the Chamber of Agriculture, but we have no other prospects that are as advanced.
Despite these obstacles, we consider this model to be interesting. It allows local economic benefits for our suppliers. But above all, it promotes better ownership of energy issues by our members and by the owners of roofs that we canvass and, more broadly, by the public to whom we address at our public meetings (when the pandemic does not prevent us from organize).
The tremendous development in ten years of the network of Village Centers demonstrates the relevance of the model: 32 producing companies, 55 committed territories, 360 installations in service, more than 5,000 shareholders. And many other companies of the same type exist, whether on the initiative of collectives or supported by the shared energy network.
Citizen participation must imperatively be the foundation of our energy model. Alongside public operators for whom citizen participation must be strengthened, we must promote the growth of all these local initiatives that anchor energy issues in their territory.
Laurence Boubet is a member of the Board of Directors of Attac France and President of “Central Villages Soleil Sud Bourgogne”.
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