French land management firm Veolia has launched a project to build 300MW of solar capacity on its landfill sites in France, as the French energy sector looks to decarbonise its operations, despite growing concerns over the availability of land.
Veolia plans to build 40 solar farms over the course of the initiative, and aims to bring the first projects online in 2027. The initiative follows in the footsteps of a similar scheme in the UK, which saw Veolia fund a 59MW solar farm on a landfill site in Essex, and considering Veolia is neither a solar manufacturer, nor developer, will likely have to partner with other firms to complete the work, as it did with REG Power Management in the UK.
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“For several months, we have been screening all our sites in order to use every appropriate space to maximise energy production,” said Veolia CEO Estelle Brachlianoff, who pointed to other clean power projects installed at Veolia facilities that have an annual power output of 800GWh. “From now on, our landfills, most of which already produce biogas or biomethane, will also be able to produce solar energy.”
Projects such as these could help France realise its ambitious clean energy goals, and its solar targets in particular, with the latest draft updates to the country’s National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) setting a target of adding 5.5-7GW of new solar capacity a year until the end of the decade.
Considering that solar met just 4.2% of France’s energy demand in 2022, meeting such targets would radically alter the country’s energy mix, and could well require the support of companies outside of the energy sector, such as Veolia.
Veolia’s work also aims to overcome what it called a “significant land shortage” in France, where a combination of arduous permitting processes and the designation of only a small percentage of the French land as available for human development, including energy projects, has cast doubt over the future of the French solar sector. Speakers at Solar Media’s Solar Finance & Investment Europe event last week discussed this, and the “tension” that has arisen from this situation.