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Henri Poupart-Lafarge joins HoloSolis as it bids to boost Europe’s solar manufacturing capacity by building a gigafactory in France
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The former boss of French rail and energy company Alstom has been appointed chief executive of solar panel manufacturer HoloSolis.
Henri Poupart-Lafarge was CEO of Alstom – one of the world’s most established makers of trains and also a pioneer of steam and gas turbines – from 2016 to March of this year.
Paris-headquartered HoloSolis is building a gigafactory in the Grand Est region of northeast France to manufacture cells and modules. The company claims that when complete, the facility will be able to produce 5GW of solar panels – equivalent to 10 million panels – and create 2,000 jobs.
Poupart-Lafarge said that the “reindustrialisation of green technologies in France is key to making the green transition possible”.  
He added that the gigafactory was being built “at a time when Europe is becoming acutely aware of how far behind it is and of the urgency to act on solar energy issues”.
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It was this need to address Europe’s industrial competitiveness and reclaim a chunk of the global solar that drove the formation of HoloSolis in 2022 by , which then brought in two French partners, real estate developer IDEC Group and agrivoltaic company TSE.
China currently produces 80% of the world’s installed photovoltaic modules, with the EU lagging at 3%. Poupart-Lafarge said: “Photovoltaics has accounted for two-thirds of new electricity generation capacity worldwide by 2025, driven both by the competitiveness of this technology and its environmental performance.
“All the major economic powers, such as China, the United States and India, have built up a sector in this strategic field to ensure their energy sovereignty. But not Europe. I firmly believe that this can still be rectified.”
Poupart-Lafarge is a graduate of École Polytechnique, École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He started his career at the World Bank in Washington before joining France’s Ministry of Economy and Finance in 1994, and subsequently Alstom in 1998 as head of investor relations.
In his time at Alstom, he was senior vice-president of finance at its transmission and distribution, president of the grid division and president of the transport division before becoming chief executive in 2016.
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