Swiss renewable energy developer Axpo has started commercial operations at the largest rooftop solar project in France, an industrial facility with a power generation capacity of 12.8MW.
Urbasolar, an Axpo subsidiary, operates the project, which has been installed on a rooftop owned by French real estate development company Percier Réalisation et Développement (PRD). The project’s partners include PRD and Harbert Management Corporation (HMC), an investment manager, which has worked with Urbasolar in the past.
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“This project in Beauvais highlights the expertise that the Axpo Group, through Urbasolar, has developed in France,” said Antoine Millioud, the head of Axpo’s Solar Division. “We are confident that our capabilities in delivering large-scale solar installations will further advance the energy transition and security of supply across Europe.”
Axpo has more than 10GW of renewable power capacity in its pipeline across six European countries, including 1.2GW in its home country of Switzerland. The company has already built more than 700 utility-scale projects in France alone.
France has expanded its solar portfolio considerably in recent years, reaching 20GW of installed capacity at the end of 2023, and commissioned close to 1GW of new projects in the last quarter of the year, according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
The government is planning to operate 60GW of solar capacity by 2030, according to its most recent National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP), and the commissioning of a landmark rooftop solar project will help realise this ambition. Axpo alone operates 190MW of rooftop solar capacity in France, and in recent years, the government passed legislation to exempt PV projects of less than 300kW from preliminary environmental assessments, to encourage the greater implementation of small-scale solar projects in the residential sector in particular.
