The Commission de Régulation de l’Energie (CRE) announced on Monday that the manager of the RTE (electricity transmission network) will pay back by March 15 nearly 2 billion euros to its users, mainly distributors. This restitution also concerns nearly 380 industrial customers and will result in lower rate increases for the coming years.
Causes and recipients of the special payment
This sharp rise in European prices in 2022 is the reason for the significant variations in expenses and revenues for RTE, which results in a surplus linked to the increase in interconnection revenues. The main beneficiaries will therefore be distributors, managers of the medium and low voltage network such as Enedis or certain local companies, as well as industrial customers, 200 of whom are electro-intensive.
Origins and implications for the future
The surplus comes in particular from tolls paid by importing or exporting suppliers of electricity at European borders. This is, according to RTE, a “half” of what the service would be charged in 2022 to consumers and “nearly 15% [pour] producers”. In addition, this payment will make it possible to mitigate in the longer term any “tariff catch-ups” applied to consumers following an unavailability affecting up to half of the French nuclear fleet.
