600.000 photovoltaic installations in France, +20% in one year

At the end of September, the country had nearly 600.000 installations, including a third in individual self-consumption, the whole representing a total solar production of more than 13 gigawatts (GW), according to Open Data from Enedis, the network manager of electricity distribution in France.

This boom, against a backdrop of the energy crisis, comes as France is lagging behind in the deployment of renewable energies, its official objective in solar remaining very far away, i.e. 20 GW in 2023.

The country has almost 90.000 more installations than last year at the same period, an increase of +20%.

In the 3rd quarter of 2022 alone, Enedis indicates that it recorded requests for connection to the network for a total power of nearly 1,1GW: a figure that has been increasing over the past two years (0,8 GW in the third quarter of 2021, 0,6 GW on that of 2020).

In particular, the number of individual self-consumption installations has almost doubled in 18 months in mainland France, with nearly 208.000 individual self-consumption customers connected to the public network at the end of September. They were 108.664 at the end of March 2021 and... 3.000 in 2015.

These customers are mainly equipped with installations of less than 36 kilovolt-amperes (kVa).

"Enedis is seeing a marked acceleration in the number of self-consumers", underlines the company, noting that this self-consumption concerns almost only photovoltaics, "and not only in the sunniest regions".