France connected 1,495 MW of new solar capacity during the first quarter of 2026, according to data from French statistics agency SDES. The figure is slightly below the 1,571 MW recorded over the same period of 2025.
Installations above 500 kW accounted for 30% of this new capacity but represented only 0.3% of new connections, while installations below 9 kW accounted for 74% of new connections but only 7% of installed capacity.
Additions from the first quarter of this year take France’s total solar capacity to 33 GW, 32.1 GW of which is located in mainland France.
Over the first quarter, gross solar photovoltaic electricity production amounted to 6.6 TWh in metropolitan France, compared with 5.9 TWh a year earlier. When excluding self-consumption, production reached 6.2 TWh and represented 4.6% of metropolitan electricity consumption, an increase of 0.7 percentage points compared with the first quarter of 2025.
SDES’ update also highlights that self-consumption continues to grow. In the first quarter of 2026, 62% of photovoltaic installations, representing 19% of installed capacity, produced electricity that was fully or partially self-consumed. These shares increased by 1.5 and 0.5 percentage points against the fourth quarter of 2025.
In total, 481 GWh of photovoltaic electricity were self-consumed in metropolitan France during the first quarter of this year, representing 7% of total photovoltaic output. Fully self-consuming installations produced 247 GWh, accounting for 51% of self-consumed volumes.
Meanwhile, the capacity of projects in the grid connection pipeline declined by 2% compared with the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching 36.1 GW, of which 8.4 GW already had a signed connection agreement.
The regions of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Occitanie and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes together accounted for 50% of the photovoltaic capacity connected in France as of March 31, 2026. Momentum remained strong in these areas, which represented 46% of newly connected capacity over the quarter.
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