France has reached the milestone of 600,000 photovoltaic installations, all powers combined, a number up 20% in one year, said Monday Enedis, which includes a boom in self-consumption.
At the end of September, the country had nearly 600,000 installations, a third of which were self-consumption, representing a total solar production of more than 13 gigawatts (GW), according to the Open Data of Enedis, the manager of the electrical distribution network in France.
This boom, against the backdrop of the energy crisis, comes at a time when France is lagging far behind in the deployment of renewable energies, with its official target for solar power remaining a long way off, at 20 GW by 2023.
The country has almost 90,000 more installations than last year at the same time, an increase of +20%.
In the third quarter of 2022 alone, Enedis reports having registered grid connection requests for a total capacity of nearly 1.1GW: a figure that has been rising over the past two years (0.8 GW in the third quarter of 2021, 0.6 GW in the third quarter of 2020).
In particular, the number of individual self-consumption installations has almost doubled in 18 months in metropolitan France, with nearly 208,000 individual self-consumption customers connected to the public grid at the end of September. There were 108,664 at the end of March 2021 and… 3,000 in 2015.
These customers are mostly equipped with installations of less than 36 kilovoltamperes (kVa).
“Enedis notes a clear acceleration in the number of self-consumers,” the company said, noting that this self-consumption is almost exclusively photovoltaic, “and not only in the sunniest regions.
