According to the elected ecologist and co-treasurer of the Europe Ecologie les Verts party, Marine Tondelier, interviewed on Sunday September 11 on franceinfo, the city of Grenoble works only thanks to renewable energies. “Eric Piolle, in 2014, with his team, put 200 million euros on the table. And the result today is a city that runs on 100% renewable energy. 100%.”, she assured. It’s wrong. Grenoble may well have been crowned “European green capital”, the city does not work “100%” thanks to renewable energies, contrary to what the elected ecologist says. Marine Tondelier is actually making a big abuse of language.
“Grenoble runs 100% on renewable energy”, says Marine Tondelier, who points to the responsibility of the “nuclear lobby” for France’s delay in terms of ecological transition pic.twitter.com/R8wUduuitz
— franceinfo (@franceinfo) September 11, 2022
Contacted, the mayor, Eric Piolle, explains that in 2018 the mixed economy company GEG (Gaz electricity de Grenoble), of which the city is the majority shareholder, launched a big plan to produce more renewable electricity each year. .
120 million euros have been invested so that by the end of 2022 GEG achieves this objective summed up in one sentence by Grenoble: to cover the equivalent of the consumption of Grenoble residents. This does not mean that all inhabitants now only consume green electricity.
Grenoble, by being a shareholder of GEG, chooses to promote the “guarantee of origin”. The electricity supplier undertakes that for each megawatt hour consumed by a Grenoble resident, as much green electricity will be reinjected into the network. More concretely, the city is investing in a company that is committed to increasing the share of renewable energy it produces, in particular by investing in wind, photovoltaic or hydroelectric farms.
In this case, the plan provided for tripling the quantity of green energy produced by GEG by 2022. But this green energy in fine is necessarily found in the global network, it is therefore not reserved for the inhabitants of Grenoble confirms Christine Gochard, General Manager of GEG.
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