No, but to come back to it, I support what Béatrice said. I think that 10 or 15 years ago these technologies were not yet mature, so an economic framework had to be put in place to get things moving. Today, I have already expressed myself on the subject: onshore solar and onshore wind can survive without necessarily having their revenues guaranteed. And in the French model, what I have often expressed is that in the end it is the State that takes the market risk. And it has a flaw: it does not encourage what a producer should do, which is to try to bring its costs down as much as possible. Costs are higher in our country, by the way, because I think that precisely because we are in a subsidized environment, we drive up land prices, we drive up connection costs, delays, and so on. We can go back over all of that.
There is a very different model. There is nowhere with zero subsidy, zero aid. The completely opposite model is the American model, which has tax support systems for investment, but then you are on the market: you build your solar plants, you build your batteries. And what I have observed is that, as a result, there is a virtue in that model: since you do not know what the market price will be when you sell, you forget about it and you manage to choose the most cost-efficient projects, and on the other hand you are very quickly incentivized to install batteries, otherwise you are exposed to fluctuations. There is a virtue in moving towards more hybrid systems, which often correspond — and this is the point — to what customers are looking for. Because in the end, the notion of the PPA, why is it a success? Our industrial customers, including in Europe, are looking today for a certain visibility on the price of electricity, and the PPA can give them visibility over a 10 to 15-year horizon. And in the end it is an answer to what customers want. Afterwards, they want not only visibility, they want it not to be too expensive, which is constant in energy. So that is up to us to deliver, and the way to do it is indeed to move towards hybrid PPAs, towards a combination of what is called clean firm power. We will put in solar, sometimes a combination of solar and wind that works well, plus possibly as a complement some flexible assets from gas-fired plants, just to firm it up. So I think there is a virtue in moving towards that model. It meets a customer demand and it also allows us, I would say, to manage this public money in the best possible way. So as I said at the Jean-Bernard Lévy mission, I think we should move much faster towards that model. We must not be afraid of the unknown; from time to time, you have to take the leap. I am totally — let me be clear — I think we must continue to invest in renewables in France. That is not my objective, quite the opposite. I even think that the lesson I draw from the crisis we have experienced over the past few months is that fundamentally we need an abundance of energy. We need an abundance of electricity. The price of electricity in France has remained relatively low, weak, or rather stable, despite the crisis that other countries have experienced, precisely because we produce a lot of electricity thanks to nuclear, which works well, but also thanks to renewable energies. And we must not start saying that because demand is not keeping up we are going to slow down. I think that no, if we want to ensure that this electricity in France remains affordable, which is an asset for our country, we must continue to invest. So I am not trying to do less. I think we simply need to be honest about where things stand, and I think we could have tenders that are more favorable to innovations such as solar-battery hybridization to encourage batteries. Battery costs have fallen a lot over the past two years. So we see that we have a field for experimentation. There is one area where we will struggle to do without CfDs, which is offshore wind, because that is an area where costs are still high and hard to control. But there you have it. So my point of view is that yes, we must move towards PPAs, we must push, we must find the means. For example, I think that today, if you want in France to exit your historical CfD that you signed, or rather committed to, in order to move to a PPA, it is totally off-putting. The penalties we face are dissuasive. So we are not being encouraged to save money for the State. I think that is one of the recommendations taken up in the Jean-Bernard Lévy report. Frankly, I would say it is a simple way: if after all we want to take back an asset to put it on the open market, to move to a contractualized one, it will save money for the State, and I do not see why I should pay penalties to exit that model. There you go, it is a simple idea and I think we should encourage it. Then, there will be no big bang, I am aware of that. We can also study mechanisms that exist in some European countries. In Portugal there is a quite intelligent Cap and Floor system, that is to say CfDs where you are guaranteed a notional revenue on a given capacity. If you produce more, well, you are on the market. Anyway, we can find methods that deeply encourage moving towards a market, once again, for technologies that have become competitive. And that is what is needed, because what worries me in the current French debate is that in the end people want to call into question the fact that these renewable sectors are competitive. They are competitive, they are useful. So we must continue investing. We just need to adapt our methods. We are not 15 years ago, at the time when they really had to be launched; they are now. So all players must have confidence in us; we have no problem developing, deploying, and we will find customers if we roll up our sleeves. So I think we must respond, because otherwise in the end we get a very Manichean debate that is dangerous, all or nothing. And that is above all what must be avoided. So it is up to us, the players in the renewable sector, to take our responsibilities.
To share with you our story, which is recent in these energies, much more recent than EDF's. In 2020, we said to ourselves that we would try to reach 35 GW of gross capacity. We reached them. We set ourselves targets by country. There is one country where we did not reach our objective at all, and I regret it: France. And conversely, we were far more successful than we expected in the United States or in other countries like Brazil and India. And in France, why? Well, because it is not for lack of trying. I have large teams; we have even unfortunately had to reduce them a bit. It is that in fact the projects are not very large, land is expensive, procedures are long, and so where we had said we would build 5 GW, we built 2. I still have 5 years and I have plenty, and I have quite frustrated teams because they have an important pipeline and they keep showing us how long it takes to clear the appeals. So there is an extremely long path. I know that at one point a minister said, 'We are going to pass a simplification law.' Unfortunately, the simplification law invented extra committees that did not really simplify, or at least I have not seen the effects on the ground. So it is frustrating because it is not at all a problem of financing. We are ready to finance, quite the opposite. I would even say — afterwards let's just look at a table to tell you again about the price issue, why we have an issue in France. I was looking at onshore wind. This year we came out at the floor tariff at €77 per MWh. Germany: €55 per MWh. Italy 72, Spain 43, Portugal 32 — that is onshore wind. We did not have a tender this year, but last year we were at 79; it will probably come down. 47-48 in Germany, 56 in Italy, 32 in Spain, 11 in Portugal. So we have an issue, and why? Because in fact all of this reflects, somewhere, a succession of costs. There is the connection cost in France. The connection cost represents about 25% of the cost of modules in a solar installation. In Germany, it is 10%. Well, it is a choice about how connection costs are spread, but you have to bear it.
Then you have rules. When we do repowering in France, we can go up to 2.8 MW. In Germany, 5.1 MW. Why? Because there are military, aeronautical, and landscape constraint rules for repowering. Yet repowering is obviously an extremely easy way to grow capacity. The turbines are there, you install them. And moreover, I even had to fight: there was a modification of the circular to go from 30% to 33%, because for 3% I obtained that one day by speaking first at a meeting. You see, I think of you, because I discovered that for 3% in a circular we were excluding turbines and losing repowering. No, but there are all sorts of little things like that, as Jean-Bernard said: if we took an inventory and got the good wills around a table, it costs nothing — it is not a cost, it frees up energy, to use that expression, and moves things forward. So that is roughly, I would say, a sum of things that add up to a cost. And once again, I come back to the notion that since we have a fairly comfortable CfD system, in the end all these costs translate into high floor tariffs. So for the State, which today is looking to do — it is simply that if we lifted these constraints, the floor tariffs would automatically come down and we could build as many MW with less public money. That is what I believe. So that is a good way. Then it also comes back to — but I think that implementing the measures suggested by the Jean-Bernard Lévy and Nitiat reports, let's implement them and listen to the players, who frankly have plenty of little things that would allow us, once again, to keep developing them within a budgetary framework where you spend less money.
I will take a slightly different angle on this subject, based on the experience we had when we entered this sector. We started by opening all the doors, and in particular, for example, on offshore wind we said, 'Let's look at floating offshore wind — it floats, we know how to float platforms, so we should be able to manage it.' And then five years later, we realize that the word 'transition' means something, and that facing us there are customers, and we have to produce decarbonized energy that is affordable for our customers. So, to be honest, we tended to close some doors. For example, we are no longer interested in floating offshore wind today. I say this because first there is plenty of fixed offshore wind to build. It is a bit like in the history of oil: we started by going to get oil in shallow water before going to 3,000 meters of water. And so we wanted to do everything at the same time. And the climate urgency pushed us to open all the doors. Simply, we also need to bring down emissions more effectively. I spent 10 days in China this summer and I was quite surprised to see that the subject everyone was working on was a very concrete one: hybridization between solar, battery, and grid. They added the grid dimension. How to optimize? Well, they are deploying massively, in the background there, in inland Mongolia. When I say massively, it is beyond what we imagine — it is absolutely hundreds of square kilometers of solar, wind, and batteries. And I was struck, because we work on solar-battery hybridization, but we had not added the grid. Yet grids become essential in the end if we want to optimize all our investments to deliver affordable energy to the customer. So today we have decided to invest, notably in digital and electricity. There is plenty to do, but rather: how can we make better use of these technologies that are mature and make them even more efficient, rather than going into future technologies? Because once again, it is not a criticism — I am just observing — but already making fixed wind competitive... well, EDF is much better at it than we are, but we are struggling a bit for the moment. Making it competitive will be tough. In France it is a bit specialized, since it happens that the connection up to offshore is done by RTE, whereas in most other countries the offshore connection is up to us. I mean, the experience we have is not easy to replicate for offshore connections in the United States. That is why we licensed it out, or elsewhere. But as for floating offshore wind, we are in a dimension of x3. We are not at €100, we are at €300. Just to give you an idea. Let's say €200, but it does not matter. I will watch with interest how much people bid in the next tenders. No, so it is a question — and for once I really think — of where we put our public money to bring about the most efficient new systems, knowing that the objective is to reduce emissions in the end; it is not just about technological innovation. It is about how we can be the most effective at reducing emissions. So at our company, we decided that we would allocate capital — and I continue to invest 3 to 4 billion a year in all these decarbonized energies — but that we would do it primarily on the systems where the cost of CO2 abated seems to us the most efficient for society. That does not mean we do not have advanced research in certain areas, but we cannot open up all avenues. So I think, for example, that we should run innovative floor tenders on the solar-plus-battery mode, push hybridization now, because we are close to it, we can encourage all players, and we will also have an impact on the whole debate. Renewables, wind — it is intermittent, it puts a mess in the grid. No, it does not put that much of a mess in the grid if we pair it with batteries. We can be a bit smarter than that. So we have to convince people that all of this is useful. Basically, we need to move towards a MW that is more useful for the consumer and for the grid. Once again, I insist on the grid dimension, because what we observe everywhere in the world is that there is a limit, a kind of ceiling to wanting to develop renewables. When you get to 40-45%, at some point the historical grids cannot absorb any more. And then you get into absolutely terrible curtailment phenomena that destroy the value of our investments. So I think there is a coupling dimension. We cannot ignore that these energies are intermittent. So I defend them because they are useful, they are decarbonized. But we must take into account — for me the next step is how we make them not simply intermittent but firm 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are some very beautiful projects being carried out in Abu Dhabi at the moment that are very interesting to follow, coupling a lot of batteries, solar, and wind. But I think that is a very promising path, because it makes it possible to have renewable energy that is available all the time. And that is what we should be seeking to do, because we have the maturity. Once again, I admire the people who are ahead of the curve.
So, I think we answered that question about ten years ago. I used to manufacture solar panels in Europe. Then one day, I was told in Brussels — and in Paris too — that no, what was good for the consumer was the cheapest solar panels, which were Chinese, and so there would be tariffs on Chinese panels. I had to close several solar panel factories in Europe. So I am happy for the question to be asked again, and I think that in this affair we confuse sovereignty and autarky. For us, the issue is not to depend — it is not to have a hyper-dependence on a single supply chain for our renewable energies. We can also want to promote, in certain sectors, European manufacturers who build on European manufacturing capacity. In our tender for the offshore wind in the English Channel that we won, we won it partly because we wrote that we would use turbines manufactured in Europe. Well, it was not extraordinary. The factory is not far. I mean, after having studied the Chinese wind turbine market, we thought it was perhaps not a given to bring them back to Europe, and we saw the political obstacle to doing so. Which, by the way, is proving true — apart from with the British, they are having more trouble establishing themselves in Germany and probably with us. But those are choices made at the European level. So on this, I think that with India, for example, we have developed today — India has gone full throttle into solar panel production and they are extremely efficient. They are even, they are so full-on that they are almost in overcapacity. So they are starting to export them. And our strategy consists of diversifying: above all, not depending only on Chinese suppliers who, as if by chance, from time to time start raising prices and causing us problems. We must diversify. Believing that we will reinstall this whole industry in Europe — I think that is not true. We are telling ourselves stories. Then, there are critical materials. We see efforts being made on batteries, and I am not in that project. I am in another project and it is not a given. It is not a given because there too we face Chinese competition, which is very good technologically. They are very good, and so how do we catch up on the time we have lost? It is not simple, especially since the battery market, in this case, is tomorrow morning, because electric cars have to run right away. So there is a synchronization problem there. I think what is important for us in Europe is diversification and above all not being dependent on a single source. So we must diversify our supply sources and then identify, in certain areas — not nuclear, I am not the expert, and Béatrice to come back on that — areas where we have real expertise and where we must preserve and maintain it. There is no point believing that we will be self-sufficient in all sectors. The idea that Europe will become autarkic is a bad one. That is not what sovereignty is. Sovereignty consists of diversifying, being able to maintain our supply whatever happens in the various crises around the world. That is how I see the subject.
Buffon, Patrick Pouyanné, he did not cite floating offshore wind as possibly an industry of the future, because we do have this seafront, we have these ports that can... Yes, we are starting a small project on the Mediterranean, 30 MW, and I can tell you that the cost per MW is not cheap. But in fact we are happy. By the way, I had put it in the research and development category, not in production, so it produces. We observe it, we watch it, we watch the floating turbines. But I agree, it is a real issue, a choice between price and constraints. Once again, I think we should go about it gradually, that we have a minimum of European content. Yes, let us leave ourselves the choice of knowing what the arguments are. We are getting into subjects that are much too detailed with diabolical specifications. In the end, we cannot do everything. So I think I understand the approach. I am rather in favor of the European Net-Zero Industry Act. After all, it is public money that is being spent. So let public money serve to finance, in a way, the emergence of jobs in Europe. I can only agree. Simply, it does not happen overnight, and making regulations that are too complicated, and in the end it is a choice — it will cost a bit more. So we all have to accept it. In the United States, since Trump put tariffs on all Chinese panels and batteries, I can tell you that yes, there are industries. But the prices of renewable energies in the United States — and since he does not like them, he is coherent, he made prices go up. Well, it remains competitive, we manage anyway. We manage to make them competitive, we manage to develop remarkably in the United States, in line with our plans. But despite that, everything has gone up. So in the end it is a choice between the consumer and... At the moment when Europe says we have a competitiveness problem with our energy, and renewables must do what they can — the Lévy report contributes to lowering the cost of electricity. Careful not to take contradictory injunctions, as you say — I like that expression. So there you go, it is not easy, but I remain convinced that in the end I prefer prices and fairly transparent tenders. To be honest, I do not really like non-economic criteria where you wonder what happens, which means that with CRE you submit a file and you get the answer 3 months later. I do not know what they do for 3 months. In some countries, when I submit a file — I work in Brazil, I submit a file in Brazil and I have a screen that gives me the answer 10 minutes later. So I would like something in between. So transparency is good too.
I defended this idea because I do not believe in simplifying rules in our country. I do not believe it. Sometimes you look at a file and they add two more requirements. So I think we lack the means today to speed up the processing of these files. That is what I think. I think that the more civil servants there are, the more complicated the procedures will be. That is a point of view from an interlocutor here in Paris. But if you are in Kuala Lumpur or Nairobi, you never ask that question. Today, the truth is that yes, we Westerners use too much energy per capita and we must make efforts to reduce energy consumption. There are plenty of countries on the planet — there are 5 billion people who lack energy and for them it is simply vital in order to develop. So the planetary limits are not seen the same way depending on whether you live in Paris or elsewhere. That is what I think. But it is a valid issue, and I think that everything we are trying to do with the development of these technologies must help avoid using natural resources and move towards other means of developing. But believing that we will manage to control energy demand at the global scale — we are very far from that.
