Does France really have more renewable energy consumption than Germany?

Is France better than its German neighbor on renewable energies? This is what Agnès Pannier-Runacher said this Wednesday morning on Franceinfo, the day after an agreement between the Twenty-Seven on a reform of the European electricity market. “To remind you of one thing, France today has more renewable energy in its final consumption than the Germans,” argued the Minister of Energy Transition. Is she telling the truth?

The latest data on the subject available to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, dates back to 2021. And they indeed show that Paris is doing a little better than Berlin in this area. That year, in France, 19.3% of the energy consumed was produced from renewable sources (wind, solar, hydraulic, wood, etc.). Or only 0.1% more than in Germany (19.2%).

Data for 2022 will be published by Eurostat around mid-December. However, both France and Germany have already published their own estimates - calculated according to European conventions. And here again, very slight advantage for France. The French Ministry of Energy Transition estimates the share of renewable energies in gross final energy consumption at 20.7% - i.e. the sum of final consumption in industry, transport, services, residential and agriculture-fishing, electricity production and heat production sold - in France last year. While the German Federal Environment Office estimates it at 20.4%.

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For Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, there is no reason to jump for joy. This advantage of France over Germany is mainly explained, according to this researcher in European energy policy, by the geographical differences between the two countries. “Around half of the final energy consumed in France comes from wood. However, France has more forests than Germany, due to its greater surface area,” underlines the program director at the Institute of Economics for Climate (I4CE). The same goes for hydroelectricity, “the leading source of renewable electricity in France thanks to the significant presence of rivers and mountains in our country,” adds the expert. On the other hand, on solar or wind power, the fruit of real political choices, “France is far behind Germany,” notes Thomas Pellerin-Carlin.

Furthermore, if the French government can, in fact, congratulate itself on doing a little better than its German partner on renewable energies, France remains behind in Europe when we broaden the focus to the entire continent. In 2021, according to Eurostat, the average in the EU stood at 21.8%. Paris, for example, remains very far from Sweden (62.6%), Finland (43.1%), Latvia (42.1%), Estonia (38%) or Austria (36.4% ). On the other hand, it is at approximately the same level as the two other great powers of Western Europe, Italy (19%) and Spain (20.7%).

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Likewise, comparing ourselves to Germany should not prevent us from seeing that France has not achieved its objectives in terms of developing renewable energies. It is even the only EU country to have missed the objective it set for 2020, as part of the European “2020 energy-climate package”, i.e. 23% of its final energy consumption. That year, it reached only 19.1%. And two years later, in 2022, this share has still not been reached. It is important to note, however, that several other European countries have resorted to statistical transfers from surplus states to achieve their objectives. What France refused to do. “In 2010, we set a very ambitious objective for 2020, higher than that of Germany, which was 19%”, we defend on the side of the Ministry of Energy Transition.

At the start of 2022, when the data for the year 2020 was made public, the French executive still admitted to being “late”, while highlighting an “acceleration” of the development of renewable energies during the five-year term. “The dynamic is there,” we assured. Since then, in particular, the government has introduced a law “for the acceleration of the production of renewable energies”, adopted at the start of 2023.

Faced with these figures, “it would be a shame to have a speech suggesting that France is a very good student in terms of renewables,” judges Thomas Pellerin-Carlin. And we will have to further accelerate their deployment if France wants to meet its 2030 ambition, which the 2019 energy-climate law set at 33%. And which should soon be increased to correspond to the new European objective, approved this month, of 42.5% renewables at EU level by 2030 (compared to 32% until then). “This work is being carried out as part of the next multi-annual energy program,” says Agnès Pannier-Runacher’s office.

In summary, Agnès Pannier-Runacher is factually right when she asserts that France does better than Germany in terms of the share of renewables in final energy consumption. However, it is important to put this observation into perspective. On a European scale, Paris remains lagging behind. France is even the only EU country in 2020 not to have achieved its renewable deployment objective.