French renewable energy firm GreenYellow has signed an agreement with supermarket giant Carrefour to install over 350MW of solar canopies above the latter’s car parks across France.
The deal will see GreenYellow install solar carports at 90 hypermarkets and 260 supermarkets across France by 2027 – specifically in “key regions” of Normandy, Île-de-France, Hauts-de-France, Grand Est, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Occitanie and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. GreenYellow said that the plan will be the “largest” decentralised solar programme in Europe.
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The project will begin development this month, GreenYellow said, with the first sites expected to be commissioned in 2025. The total decentralised portfolio will generate 450GWh of solar power annually.
GreenYellow added that its third-party financing model would allow Carrefour to benefit from the solar capacity in an “X-as-a-service” model. Carrefour has said it aims to be powered by 100% renewable energy by 2030.
Mathieu Cambet, deputy general manager at GreenYellow France, said: “This programme confirms the leading role that GreenYellow has played for years in promoting self-consumption in France. We are now entering the operational phase with the development, finalisation of the referencing of technical partners, as well as the creation of the global ecosystem allowing us to deploy it.”
In November 2022, the French government approved legislation requiring solar PV at all large, outdoor car parks with more than 80 spaces. At the time of the legislation, French senator Jean-Pierre Corbisez estimated that the law could add between 6.7GW and 11GW of solar PV capacity across France.
The most recent distributed rooftop auction in France awarded 179MW of capacity to 50 projects across the country; less than half of the capacity awarded in the previous round of the same tender. Appetite for rooftop PV in Europe has fallen over 2024 as the price of electricity has recovered from the shockwaves of the energy crisis over 2022-23. Data from pv.index – a European solar trading platform – shows that demand fell from February to May largely due to the more manageable price of electricity for homeowners.
