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From solar panels on supermarket car parks to experiments on agricultural land, France is taking advantage of the sun to massively increase its solar powered energy.
In the days leading up to the Pentecost public holiday, before the temperatures really spiked, France produced so much solar-generated electricity that prices on European energy markets dipped into the negative.
The country has been over-producing solar electricity for weeks. As has Europe’s largest solar supplier, Germany, and the UK.
This energy-source power-generation monitor shows real-time levels of energy production in France. At the time of writing, solar power was generating nearly 30 percent of the country’s total power output – only the country’s nuclear power plants were generating more – and nearly 75 percent of its entire renewable power production.
France was exporting nearly 9,900MW of electricity.
Around the same time, this post was doing the rounds on social media, claiming that France had just completed the world’s largest agrivoltaic trial, installing solar panel canopies above 2,400 hectares of Provence vineyards, cereal fields, and vegetable plots, generating 500 megawatts of clean electricity from land producing full agricultural output.

 
The trial in Provence, run by a company called Sun’Agri, exists. Contrary to the post’s claims, however, the government’s Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’alimentation et l’Environnement (Inrae) is not involved.
Inrae is, however, running its own agrivoltaic study – based not far from Clermont-Ferrand, in Puy-de-Dôme. It is trialled on livestock land and uses double-sided east-west facing vertical solar panels known as ‘solar hedges’ for a ‘two-peak production profile’ to coincide with peak morning and evening demand, the agency’s website confirms.
Launched in 2022, the trial still has more than two years to run, but regional newspaper La Montagne reported in May 2025 that initial results were promising.
Even if this doesn’t work out, the scale of France’s solar production is still set to increase. From this summer, work will commence to partially cover large supermarket car parks with solar panels, as part of a law that was passed in 2023.
In some areas, that work has already begun. The law originally said that “any outdoor parking lot larger than 1,500m² must cover half its surface area with solar panels by the summer of 2026 for the larger ones, and by 2028 for the rest”.
Lobbying from supermarkets – shocked at the cost and the timescale – led to a quiet shift in the terms of the law, which now states that “50 percent of the surface area must be shaded”, but only 17.5 percent by solar panels. The rest may be shaded by trees.
Even though the solar panelling of French supermarket carparks has been scaled back, it still marks a significant increase in solar power generation in France over the next few years – without counting the number of property owners opting to have panels installed at home.
During the summer months, solar power is now one of the biggest suppliers of electricity in the EU. 
Generation records have already been broken this spring in France, Germany, and the UK, and we’re only at the start of summer 2026.  According to SolarPower Europe, France could reach around 56GW of installed solar capacity by 2030.
This hasn’t all been plain sailing, however, suppliers in Europe have already had to temporarily switch off solar electricity generation as ageing grids struggled to absorb the surge in renewable output. One report estimated that enough solar electricity to supply Greater London for a year – around 40 terawatt-hours – would effectively be lost in the next few months because supplies had to be cut to protect the straining grid.
This is, in part, why President Emmanuel Macron has rallied big business behind plans to improve the electrification of France.
On Tuesday, he said that thousands of companies would be involved in the country’s effort to double the share of domestically produced electricity in its energy mix to 60 percent by 2030.
The government is to double ⁠state support to €10 billion a year through 2030 to reduce France’s dependence on imported fossil ​fuels and boost ‘Made in France’ electricity from nuclear and renewable energy in power ​generation, heating, transportation, and industry.
Electricity supplier EDF said it will spend €240 million to help households and businesses switch from fossil fuels to electricity, as part of the drive towards full electrification, while power grid operators, including RTE, have pledged to lay 45,000km of transmission and distribution lines by 2030.
France also plans to double its production of electric vehicle charging sites, produce one million heat pumps and to double the production of electric radiators by 2030.
Electricity production in France is already “95 percent fossil fuel free”, according to EDF due to a combination of renewables and nuclear power – and most years France is a net exporter of electricity. That’s only set to increase, especially while the sun shines.
Electricity tariff trial
Linked to this change in how France’s electricity is produced, householders in France who have opted for peak and off-peak electricity tariffs are being moved between summer and winter peak periods to take advantage of higher daytime electricity production due to the proliferation of solar panels across the country. Currently, in summer, France often produces more electricity than it needs during the daytime.
And, it was recently announced that EDF will later this year test flexible tariff rates to encourage customers to adjust their consumption based on electricity generation as part of a pilot programme – taking advantage of higher production due to solar power in summer months.
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