Commercial building flexibility: what the third season of Cube Flex reveals

On 10 July 2026, RTE presented the findings of the third season of Cube Flex, a scheme devoted to electrical flexibility in commercial buildings.

The headline result is a shift rate of 10% of the energy consumed, moved out of the most expensive hours, in the morning and the evening, throughout the year.

The interest of commercial buildings lies in their physical characteristics: the thermal inertia of buildings makes it possible to interrupt heating or air conditioning temporarily without any perceptible loss of comfort, and many items of equipment are naturally programmable.

For the power system, this demand response has a value that goes beyond bill savings alone. Shifting consumption at times of peak demand reduces the use of the most expensive and most emitting generation assets, and defers grid reinforcement requirements.

This value explains the attention grid operators pay to the subject: the "Portail Flexibilités" trial, approved by the CRE in July 2026, is designed precisely to make it easier for these resources to access market mechanisms.

The same reasoning applies to industrial sites, with resources that are often larger still where processes allow modulation.