French energy regulator on flexible grid connections, connection queue for battery storage

The French Energy Regulatory Commission’s (CRE) 2025 report on smart grids sets out a clear message: meeting France’s energy transition targets will require a much stronger reliance on flexibility solutions integrated from the very design stage of renewable energy projects. Conversely, solar and storage projects capable of accepting limitations, providing local flexibility, and being controllable down to low-voltage levels will enjoy a competitive advantage in accessing the grid.

This biannual exercise primarily aims to assess the level of digitalization and operational agility of the French electricity system. It also identifies pressure points to ensure that the volumes of solar and storage capacity that can effectively be connected remain compatible with France’s 2030–2050 energy trajectories.

Flexible connections: a new paradigm

Grid connection is clearly entering a new phase. While so-called “smart” or flexible (power-modulated) connection offers remain in the minority, their uptake is accelerating. In 2024, fifteen renewable energy parks were connected under flexible connection schemes (ORA-MP), compared with just five in 2023. The CRE even suggests that the current 30% power limitation could be relaxed – or potentially eliminated altogether – to integrate more renewable capacity without waiting for grid reinforcement works, and in some cases to avoid costly investments entirely.

Such offers, alongside early low-voltage PV (PV BT) connections, enable developers to significantly shorten project timelines – by up to two or even three years – by accepting temporary or permanent limits on grid injection. In 2024, the PV BT scheme, which allows photovoltaic plants to begin injecting electricity before reinforcement works (albeit with constraints), accounted for one in twenty Enedis projects above 36 kVA and represented roughly 200 MW of installed capacity.

Storage: optimizing the queue

The report further underscores the growing role of batteries as a grid planning and optimization tool. Here again, developers are increasingly opting for optimized grid connection offers (OROs), which include injection or withdrawal limits rather than full-capacity access. As a result, mapped available capacities were rapidly reserved, leading to the emergence of waiting lists. Today, around 25% of RTE’s storage connection queue – approximately 2.8 GW – is under limited connection offers.

This situation reveals a structural tension. While storage is expected to help defer certain grid investments, the geographical areas where it can effectively play this role remain limited. The surge of storage projects entering grid operators’ pipelines has therefore required the deployment of new management and monitoring tools. As a reminder, by September 1, 2025, RTE had approved 12.6 GW of battery connection requests on the public transmission network, compared with just 0.3 GW currently in operation.

The CRE notes that standardized storage templates – predefined connection offer formats specifying the technical parameters of limitations – are proving effective. It highlights, in particular, time-of-use templates, which have unlocked additional capacity. However, the regulator calls for the development of new templates to “bring more storage projects into the optimized queue.”