France experienced a further drop in its electricity consumption in 2023, the result of a desire for sobriety but also in reaction to inflation, according to a report for the year unveiled on Wednesday by the manager of high voltage lines RTE .
Consumption fell by 7 to 8% in November and December, according to a previous report.
“In 2023, electricity consumption in France, corrected for weather effects (
independent of weather variations from one year to the next
), represented 445.4 TWh, a decline of 3.2% compared to 2022. , where consumption had already reached a low of 460.2 TWh due to the energy crisis”, indicated RTE in its “2023 electricity report”.
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It even falls well below the consumption levels of 2020, the first year of the health crisis (458.7 TWh), and “we now have to go back to the beginning of the 2000s to find consumption levels comparable to that of 2023”, underlines RTE.
The decline “concerned all sectors” (residential, industrial, tertiary), underlines RTE.
The results of a survey carried out with the Ipsos institute on a large panel (13,000 people) “suggest that this reduction is not only the result of voluntary sobriety initiatives but also results from a reaction from the population and economic actors vis-à-vis the increase in prices throughout the economy.
Less fear of cuts
This drop in consumption, combined with an increase in production (+ 11%), has removed the fears of cuts which had surrounded the end of 2022, with “particularly exceptional” circumstances, underlined Thomas Veyrenc, executive director of the strategy division. , prospective and evaluation of RTE.
It was then necessary to face a hydraulic crisis (lowest production since 1976), fears over gas supplies linked to the war in Ukraine and a historic crisis in French nuclear production, affected by a phenomenon of corrosion.
This experienced a “partial recovery” (+ 15%) to 320.4 TWh, indicates RTE, which emphasizes that we remain far from the standards of previous years (394.7 TWh on average over the period 2014-2019 ).
Hydropower has also recovered (+18%), thanks to better water reserves, but it is closely followed by wind power (50.7 TWh compared to 58.8 for hydraulics) which has experienced a boom. (+ 31%), “because the installed base was significant and also because the year was windy”, underlined Thomas Veyrenc, while solar production also reached “record volumes” (21.5 TWh ).