FIERE association established in France to strengthen power network industry

The Industrial Sector of Electrical Network Companies (FIERE) association has been established in France to develop the electricity network industry.

The country’s DSO and TSO, Enedis and RTE, created the association alongside professional organisations GIMELEC, SYCABEL and SERCE.

According to Enedis in a release, the creation of the ‘Filière Industrielle des Entreprises des Réseaux Electriques’ (Industrial Sector of Electrical Network Companies) association responds to the desire to strengthen awareness of the specific challenges of electrical networks among economic, industrial, and public stakeholders, and to strengthen cooperation between its members.

Namely, the association’s objectives are five-fold:

• To support the electrification of uses and reindustrialisation: work to promote technical and financial support for low-carbon industrial projects or those with sovereignty issues (such as data centres), adapt the regulatory framework and reduce deadlines;
• To strengthen industrial production capacities, on national and European territory, of network equipment essential to the energy transition to guarantee sovereignty and security of supply;
• To secure critical supplies of metals and materials, within the framework of the Clean Industrial Deal, by developing solutions for circularity and the reuse of raw materials;
• To support the development of skills, in particular through the ramp-up of the ‘Network Schools for the Energy Transition’ programme to facilitate the recruitment of 10,000 people per year until 2030;
• To deploy a common CSR (corporate social responsibility) roadmap in a desire to develop its social impact and reduce its environmental impact.

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The association will be chaired for the next two years by Marianne Laigneau, chair of the Board of Directors of Enedis, with Philippe Piron, member of the GIMELEC board and chief executive officer, Electrification Systems at GE Vernova, serving as vice-president.

Said Laigneau in a LinkedIn post: “At the heart of the energy transition, the sector’s players are mobilising to support France in its ambition to gradually phase out fossil fuels and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

“The [five] founding members, Enedis, RTE, GIMELEC, Sycabel and SERCE – Les entreprises de la transition énergétique et numérique – will soon be joined by other network operators throughout the country, as well as by other professional organisations.”

In late March, Enedis, RTE and the same professional organisation as those in FIERE together published a study finding a network sector workforce gap of 43,000 people.

Enedis says that currently 1,600 companies (including electricity transmission and distribution managers, equipment suppliers and service providers) make up the electricity network sector, representing around 100,000 jobs.