Collective self-consumption of electricity in France

This ninth session of the seminar organised by GRETS, "Aboard the giants of the seas. An onboard ethnography of global logistics", will be attended by François-Mathieu Poupeau - LATTS and Blanche Lormeteau - CNRS, and will be introduced by Magali Pierre (GRETS - EDF R&D) and Charlotte Marcillière (GRETS EDF R&D / LATTS - UGE).

Collective self-consumption of electricity (ACCE) was created, in France, by the 2015 law on energy transition for green growth (TECV). Part of a general movement to recompose energy systems, this new scheme echoes several expectations: helping to develop renewable energies, responding to citizens' aspirations to produce and consume locally (“circuit court” notion), encouraging individuals to become more aware of the challenges of energy efficiency and sobriety.

Driven by these diverse motivations, ACCE has now established itself in the French energy landscape. This is borne out by recent figures, which show that by the end of March 2025, there were almost 900 active operations, with some 10,000 participants and 120 MW installed (compared with 140 GW of installed electrical capacity in France). While self-consumption of electricity is of considerable interest in the context of the energy transition, it is generally studied through the prism of the uses and profiles of self-consumers, focusing in particular on individual self-consumption operations. The approach presented here complements this vision, by describing the construction and evolution in context of one of the public action tools at the service of the energy transition: support for collective self-consumption projects. In this session, Blanche Lormeteau, a legal expert, and François-Mathieu Poupeau, a sociologist and political scientist, will look back at the genesis and first steps of this new instrument for public action, combining a national scale of analysis (the definition of a regulatory framework between 2015 and 2022) and a local scale (lessons drawn from a detailed study of five ACCE operations).

• Blanche Lormeteau is a jurist and researcher at the CNRS (IODE UMR 6262, University of Rennes). Her work focuses on the mobilization of energy law in the ecological transition and issues of energy justice.

• François-Mathieu Poupeau is a sociologist and political scientist, Director of Research at the CNRS (LATTS) and Professor at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. His work focuses on public action in the energy-climate field, decentralization and reform of the territorial State

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