The restitution of surplus revenues is provided for by the regulations, but RTE has decided to advance the calendar “in the context of buzzing energy prices”.
Le Monde with Reuters
As winter approaches, the announcement should interest RTE customers. The manager of the French electricity network announced, Wednesday, September 28, its intention to return more than a billion euros to them, a consequence of the exceptional revenues collected by the head of French high voltage lines in 2022 under the effect of tensions on the electricity market.
These exceptional revenues come in particular from the access rights paid by importers or electricity exporters to be able to use cross -border interconnections operated by RTE, explained the company, owned by EDF (50.1 % of the capital), the Caisse des Dépôts (29.9 %) and CNP Assurances (20 %). These recipes depend on the volumes exchanged at the borders and the price differences in electricity between France and its neighbors, who have widened in the context of the European energy crisis, fueled by the consequences of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
Four categories of customers
“Our net surplus, when we take both our revenue surplus and our excess cost, will be clearly above a billion euros. We will know the precise final figure once the year ended, But we are more likely to foreseen 1.5 billion euros or beyond, “journalists Laurent Martel, director general of finance, purchases and risks of RTE told journalists. “We will return these sums entirely in the first quarter of 2023, in proportion to the sums that customers will have paid in 2022. This amounts to reimburse a large third of the price that we will have taken from them in 2022.”
While customers’ restitutions must take place through the moderation of annual prices increases when the RTE revenues excess the forecast amounts retained by the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE), the manager of the Transport Network electricity stressed that the application of current rules would have spread over six years the restitution of the surplus observed in 2022. RTE therefore proposed, “in the context of flambée in energy prices”, Anticipate the restitution so that its users benefit from this support from the beginning of 2023, which will be the subject of a public consultation organized by CRE.
RTE has four categories of customers: 170 electricity producers, 380 industrialists directly connected to the high -voltage line network (steel, metallurgy, heavy chemistry, paper, automobile, rail transport, etc.), 130 distributors that make The link with end consumers and 240 market players (traders and service providers).
“Tariff catch”
“The money will be returned to the pro rata of the payments that we will have received in 2022. We anticipate that around 90 % of this sum will be returned to distributors, the rest returning to industrial consumers. If the restitution was around 1 , 5 billion euros, 123 million would be returned to industrial consumers early next year, “said Martel.
“For individuals, the effect is less immediate but there will nevertheless be a real benefit”, he continues, “because the distributors (…) face additional costs which will have to be covered by pricing in the Next months and next years. The restitution (…) will therefore be deduced from future pricing catching up which will impose themselves on private consumers “.