The Passive Energy Customer Is Disappearing. Are the energy retailers ready?
Customers are now active participants in the energy system. France is moving quickly, but the commercial model now must catch up.
France's energy debate has spent years asking how to produce cleaner electricity, reinforce networks and electrify the economy. While those questions are very important, such changes are very costly and take ages.But another change is now becoming impossible to ignore: the customer is changing too.
A household with rooftop solar is no longer simply consuming. A supermarket chain can shift loads across sites. An industrial plant can electrify processes, optimise demand against market conditions, and potentially monetise flexibility. Batteries and electric vehicles add another layer: energy can increasingly be stored, moved in time and managed as an asset rather than merely consumed as a commodity.
I was reminded of this at the recent Université de l’Autoconsommation Photovoltaïque (UAPV) in Paris. The event focused on solar self-consumption, regulation, storage, and the economics of a sector moving beyond subsidies. But the larger story extends well beyond photovoltaics. France is beginning to move from a market of passive energy consumers towards one in which residential, commercial and industrial customers can participate much more actively in how energy is produced, consumed and valued.
The important change is not simply that customers have more technology. It is that they can increasingly participate in the energy system.
France has plenty of electricity. The question is what customers do with it.
The starting point is unusually favorable. According to RTE’s 2025 Electricity Review, mainland France generated 547.5 TWh of electricity in 2025, of which 95.2% was low-carbon. Low-carbon output reached a record521.1 TWh, while fossil-fired generation fell to its lowest level in almost 75 years.
Yet demand tells a less exuberant story. Weather-adjusted electricity consumption was 451 TWh in 2025, broadly flat year on year and still around 6% below the 2014-2019 pre-crisis average. RTE argues that electrification of end uses is progressing more slowly than required for France's climate objectives.
That creates an unusual commercial backdrop. France has a highly decarbonised electricity system, but much of the economy still relies on fossil fuels. RTE notes that fossil fuels represented around 56% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with 27% for electricity. For retailers, the opportunity is therefore not merely to supply more electricity. It is to help customers use electricity differently - and extract more value from doing so.
Self-consumption is turning the customer into an energy ecosystem participant
Collective self-consumption (energy communities) provides one of the clearest signals. Enedis counted 1,945 collective self-consumption operations in service at 31 March 2026, up from 1,625 in 2025 and only 77 in 2021. Forty-three per cent are led by local authorities, while projects are also emerging in business and industrial zones.
The numbers are still small compared with France's overall electricity market. The direction matters more. In these schemes, the customer can be a producer and a consumer at the same time. Surplus generation can return to the grid; local production can be allocated among participants; and different actors can participate within the same local energy arrangement.
This is not merely a residential phenomenon. Enedis explicitly describes collective self-consumption as open to individuals, companies, associations and local authorities. The logic therefore applies just as much to a business park, municipal estate or group of industrial sites as it does to a collection of households.
Storage changes the question from “how much?” to “when?”
Solar generation makes customers more active. Storage makes them more flexible.
Once energy can be stored, the commercial question changes. A household can increase self-consumption rather than export at the moment of generation. A commercial site can reduce exposure during expensive periods. An industrial customer can manage loads and storage against operational constraints and market signals.
The important variable is no longer simply the quantity of electricity consumed. Timing starts to matter.
This is already visible elsewhere in Europe. Germany ended 2025 with 117 GW of installed solar capacity, according to the Bundesnetzagentur, after adding 16.4 GW during the year. Italy, meanwhile, recorded a 25.1% increase in photovoltaic generation in 2025 to more than 44 TWh, while Terna reported 884,404 storage installations with 17.9 GWh of capacity at year-end.
France, Germany and Italy are not interchangeable markets. Their regulation, generation mixes and retail structures differ substantially. But they are all moving towards an energy system in which more generation sits close to the customer, more assets sit behind the meter and more demand can be managed dynamically.
Flexibility is moving from system language to customer value
For customers, flexibility is valuable only when it produces an intelligible benefit: a lower bill, greater predictability, better use of self-generated electricity, additional revenue, or more control over when energy is consumed.
Europe is still some distance from making that normal. ACER’s 2025 retail-market analysis found that 59% of EU consumers remained on flat-price or regulated contracts. It estimated that some households could save up to EUR270 a year by switching to dynamic contracts, depending on their consumption patterns, while noting that customers with EVs or solar PV have greater flexibility potential when suitable contracts and tools exist.
The latest data underline how early the shift remains: ACER reported in 2026 that only 7% of household customers across the EU and Norway were on dynamic-price electricity contracts. The energy system may be becoming flexible rather faster than the average retail proposition.
Residential, commercial and industrial energy customers want different things, but the direction is still the same
For a household, active participation may mean using solar production to charge an EV, storing electricity for the evening, or responding automatically to a dynamic tariff. The prize is simplicity, control and potentially lower costs.
For commercial customers, the equation may involve multiple sites, rooftop generation, charging infrastructure, storage and the ability to optimise consumption across a property portfolio. Predictability and operational simplicity can matter as much as the absolute unit price.
For industrial customers, the stakes are larger again: electrifying processes, managing peak demand, protecting competitiveness and using flexibility without compromising production.
The use cases differ, but the old model - supplier sells, customer consumes - becomes increasingly inadequate for all three.
The customer should benefit from the complexity, not inherit it
There is, however, an inconvenient detail. Every new energy model creates new commercial complexity.
Collective self-consumption alone requires consumption and production curves to be measured, local generation to be allocated between participants and those quantities to be communicated to suppliers. Enedis explains that these data are then used by suppliers in customer billing. Add dynamic prices, batteries, flexibility rewards or multiple services and the number of possible flows multiplies quickly.
This is where billing matters. Still, it should remain largely invisible to the customer. The customer should see the benefit: what was consumed, produced, stored, saved, or earned. The retailer must make the complexity underneath add up.
That may ultimately be the most important shift. The passive energy customer is disappearing not because everyone suddenly wants to become an energy trader, but because the economics and technology increasingly allow customers to play a more active role without having to become one.
France is ready for a more active customer. Can retailers attract them?
France has abundant low-carbon electricity. Solar capacity is expanding. Self-consumption is accelerating. Storage and flexibility are becoming more relevant. Electrification has a long way to run.
None of these developments guarantee customer value.
That will depend on whether energy retailers can translate an increasingly sophisticated energy system into propositions that residential, commercial and industrial customers can understand and use, and whether they can measure and bill increasingly flexible energy flows without making the customer experience equally complicated.
The passive customers may disappear. The opportunity for energy retailers is to ensure that customers who contribute more to the energy system get more value from it.
