French renewables dodge legislative bullet after lower house rejects moratorium

France’s National Assembly, the lower house of the parliament, today rejected a moratorium on solar and wind permitting that would have had dramatic impacts on the nation’s power supply.

The amendment had been included in a draft bill on energy and climate policy approved in a first vote last week and would have banned the permitting and commissioning of new wind and solar installations until an independent study determined the best energy mix for the country, French media reported.

This rejection (on Tuesday), which came after a week of debates, signals a “return to reason on energy issues, a reason that we hope to see guide and enlighten future debates,” clean power advocacy group France Renouvelables [Renewables France] said on LinkedIn.

With the clear rejection, the Assembly “said ‘yes’ to our country's energy transition, yes to the development of renewable energies and to an energy strategy built around ‘real’ sovereignty,” the group added.

The down vote will send the bill back to the upper house Senate for a second reading.

Renewables alarm

The inclusion of the amendment last week Thursday had sent alarm bells ringing in the French renewables sector.

Renewables France then said 80,000 jobs are at risk – once massive solar sector redundancies are added – and warned the measure would not only cement France’s dependency on fossil fuels but also lead the country down the path to being placed under supervision and downgraded.

“Our energy program is too serious a subject for moratoriums to be decided in an empty chamber, on the basis of objectively false arguments,” Anne Catherine De Tourtier, president of France Renouvelables, said after last week's vote.

“France Renouvelables invites the national representation to return to reason, to support ‘true’ energy independence based on energy sources in our territories and not on massive imports. We call for a wake-up call and not let some decide for everyone!"

The vote last Thursday was held when many lawmakers from President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party and leftist opposition parties weren't in attendance.

This led to a rare situation in which the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen and the arch-conservative Republicans were able to push through a 65 to 62 vote in their favour to approve the amendment.

Catherine MacGregor, CEO of French energy giant Engie, warned that the moratorium would have put €5bn ($5.8bn) in wind and solar spending at risk her company had planned for the next ten years.

“We can’t handle stop and go” in an industry that requires long-term planning.”

The amendment would have also included France leaving the EU’s energy market, the construction of 14 new nuclear power stations by 2030, and the immediate re-opening of the accident-prone Fessenheim nuclear power stations near the German border that was switched off in 2020.