ENGIE, the solar leader of France with a total operated gross installed capacity of nearly 900 MW, has inaugurated the company’s PV plant to date in the country, an 82 MW installation located in Greoux-les-bains.
The farm, which covers an area of 180 hectares, went into service in June 2017, and ill will produce 128 GWh of solar energy per year thanks to its 300,000 PV panels. The installation was completed across two sites: one in Vallonque, which is 88.5 hectares, and the other Cotear du Rousset, which is 92.7 hectares. Combined, the amount of solar power produced is enough to meet the electricity consumption of 85,000 local households.
With France aiming to triple its solar capacity by 2023, ENGIE plans to increase its market share still further with an installed capacity target of 2.2 GW by 2021.
This week, France announced it would invest €20 billion in plans to increase clean energy development and installation by 70% over the next five years, and moved to reduce connection costs for smaller-scale renewables by up to 40%, in a large boost for renewables in the country.
This comes after the PV sector in France was further boosted in July 2017 with the ministry of energy having awarded 507.6 MW of PV to 77 developers in a large-scale solar auction, for project ranging between 500 kW and 17 MW.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.