France

The French government has announced the launch of a tender for 1.5 GW of ground-mounted PV and another tender for 800 MW of rooftop capacity, in order to compensate for the high failure rate of the third round of tenders for large-scale PV plants.

France-based Luciole & Basilic has developed a tracking system that can be manually oriented according to the zenith every 15 days. The startup recently introduced the first prototype and is now looking for distributors.

Several lawyers recently spoke to pv magazine France spoke about changes to the French legal framework for renewable-energy power purchase agreements (PPAs).

As efficiency records tumble and devices become more stable, Europe is seeing the beginnings of a race to commercialize high-efficiency perovskite-silicon tandem solar products, reports Valerie Thompson.

C2F has developed a building-integrated PV (BIPV) facade made of aluminum that purportedly limits the impact of hot and cold weather, while also improving solar module performance.

The renewables industry fears that the new energy bill that the French government is preparing could make clean power generation even tougher. However, solar analyst Xavier Daval says that betting everything on the nation’s nuclear power fleet is a risky strategy.

French module maker Systovi says its new solar panels weigh just 3 kg/m2. They are designed for flat tertiary rooftops that cannot support the weight of framed solar panels. It will begin selling the new modules in 2024.

France’s Sirea has developed a new range of smart plug-in systems for PV storage. The batteries can deliver from 20 kW (AC) to 500 kW, depending on the model, with storage capacities ranging from 100 kWh to 1 MWh.

SolarinBlue has deployed the first units of an offshore PV pilot plant in the Mediterranean Sea, 1.5 km off the port of Sète, France.

CEA-INES researchers and Enel have developed a new solar cell with an active area of 9 cm² and an open-circuit voltage above 1,880 mV. Their results improve on the 25.8% efficiency they achieved for the same kind of cell in December 2022.