How France is leading in the digitalisation of its electrical grid

Régis Le Drézen believes France is “one of the most advanced countries in the world when it comes to the digitalisation of its electrical grid”. He tells Jonathan Spencer Jones why.

If anyone should know a thing or two about smart grids, it’s Régis Le Drézen. He’s been the General Delegate of the French industry association Think Smartgrids since March 2022. A graduate of the Institut Supérieur de l’Electronique et du Numérique, he began his career within the EDF Group in 2000, becoming in charge of protection systems for high and extra-high voltage lines and RTE’s acoustics laboratory.

Two years later, he joined EDF GDF Services contributing to major telecom infrastructure projects. Then in 2011, he was appointed Technical Director of Smart Grid Vendée, at the time one of the most ambitious smart grid projects in France, and thereafter became director of Enedis in the Vendée region before joining Enedis’ electric mobility project in charge of development and innovation. We asked him for his insight into the status and future of the smart grid in France.

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What is the state of development of smart grids in France?

The deployment of smart grids has accelerated considerably. In just a few years, we went from R&D to the deployment of demonstrators and then to the industrialisation of many smart grid use cases. From a technology point of view, the deployment of the Linky smart meter and, more recently the rise of IoT have contributed to this acceleration, providing volumes of data that can be used to develop new services for the electrical grid.

At the same time, many technologies that were in their infancy ten years ago have made lightning progress, for example those based on artificial intelligence. Regarding the regulatory framework, it is also important to take into account the regulatory sandbox set up by the Commission de Régulation de l’Énergie (Commission for Energy Regulation, CRE), which allows derogations to be granted for testing smart grid use cases directly on the grid and as such should ease the deployment at scale of these solutions.

So far almost 30 projects have already benefitted from these derogations, especially those aiming to connect renewable energies to the grid.

What are some of the smart grid challenges and priorities in France?

Today, France is one of the most advanced countries in the world when it comes to the digitalisation of its electrical grid and the industrial deployment of smart grid use cases. RTE and Enedis, respectively France’s TSO and DSO, have already integrated many smart grid solutions into their day-to-day network management process.

For the second year running in 2023, Enedis was ranked 1st in the global Smart Grid Index and manages the world’s largest installed base of connected objects. But even though some use cases are now being deployed on a large scale, it doesn’t mean that there are no longer major challenges ahead for the smart grids industry.

First, there are still real needs in terms of innovation considering the leading role the power system must play in the energy transition. France, and to a wider extent Europe, have set ambitious goals to accelerate the deployment of renewable energies, electric mobility and, more generally, electrification in order to decarbonize our energy mix.

However, we can see that the grid is already under pressure, and this growing complexity will require us to rapidly deploy, on an industrial scale, new ‘smart’ solutions, particularly in terms of flexibility and energy demand management.

This accelerated deployment needs to be done by grid operators while conserving the perfect quality of service as degraded supply quality or selective power cuts wouldn’t be accepted by consumers today, especially electricity-intensive manufacturers. Additionally, we’re going to have to make major R&D efforts on technologies that are central to the energy transition, such as energy conversion systems.

Renewable energy technologies and charging stations are connected to the grid via power electronics. We need to get the research community and industry working together on the issues I mentioned, as Think Smartgrids is doing through its Scientific Council, but we also need to ensure industrial independence by manufacturing these converters in Europe.

On this last point, the European Commission has strong ambitions for the development of an industrial sector, in order to relocate certain production processes concerning renewable energies, network technologies and batteries.

What is Think Smartgrids’ role and some achievement highlights?

For the reasons I have mentioned, Think Smartgrids recently reviewed its strategy, notably broadening the scope of its actions to include assets that interact with the grid, from renewable energies and storage systems to electric vehicles, among others.

The association’s Commissions have also focused on topics such as flexibility, power system resilience and grid integration of renewable energies. And of course, now that certain solutions have reached maturity, another challenge is to deploy them more widely in France and to be able to export this French knowhow internationally.

On the first point, we recently published a guide for local authorities that presents a dozen smart grid use cases. It was produced with the support of the L’Agence de l’environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’énergie (Environment and Energy Management Agency, ADEME) and the public services network FNCCR, which helped us connect directly with local authorities that play a major role in deploying the use cases in their territories.

We have also strengthened our ties with competitive clusters and players such as the Banque des Territoires (Bank of the Territories), which supports local sustainability projects. Internationally, we have a number of partnerships underway, notably with the Association of Electricity Companies of Africa, Indonesia and India, and we are in contact with a number of European and international delegations to present the achievements of the French smart grid sector and encourage the emergence of new collaborations.

We also work closely with Business France and the Agence Française de Développement (French Development Agency, AFD) on these issues.

What are some current and future projects of Think Smartgrids?

As mentioned previously, the industrial development of flexibility use cases and specifically demand-side flexibility solutions is an important focus of the association for the years ahead. According to a recent report from the European business association SmartEn, the available volumes of demand side flexibility in Europe should reach 164GW by 2030 from consumers in the industrial, commercial and residential sectors.

Smart grids actors alongside European and national authorities have a key role to play by deploying collaboratively the economic, regulatory and technical conditions necessary. For the French sector specifically, bringing these actors together is the purpose of Think Smartgrids.

For this reason, the association launched earlier this year a ‘Flexibility’ working group composed of more than 20 members including RTE and Enedis, the CRE, utility companies, aggregators, consulting firms, start-ups, competitiveness clusters, etc.

The working group’s first objective is to publish a study to identify the existing obstacles, barriers and levers, in order to develop a clear, shared and actionable approach to flexibilities. In a second phase, the working group intends to coordinate the deployment of flexibility projects in territories in collaboration with local authorities.

But flexibility isn’t the sole focus of the association. We also launched two new working groups this year dedicated to ‘Collective self-consumption and energy communities’ and ‘Developing the training and skills needs of the smart grid sector’, which are working in addition to the ongoing activities of our four commissions and the Scientific Council focused on R&D priorities.