RES gets green light to establish France's 'biggest' floating solar project

• Renewables designer and property manager RES has safeguarded planning authorization for a 65.5 MW floating solar project that will certainly be set up at a former quarry in northeastern France.

Ready to be built at a 127-hectare site of former gravel pits in the Grand Est area, the plant is the largest floating PV project authorised in France to date, RES said.

The project will feature solar components dealt with onto anchored floats, and commissioning is scheduled by the end of 2023.

"This first authorisation leads the way for our various other projects of the very same kind," said Céline Spitzhorn, solar director at RES, including that the firm is currently establishing a profile of floating PV plants completing more than 200MW.

France is already residence to a 17MWp floating solar project that was stated to be the biggest facility of its kind when it was completed in 2019. Work is likewise now in progress by EDF Renewables to build a 20MW floating project that will certainly be colocated with the Lazer hydroelectric plant in southeastern France.

In other places, renewables developer BayWa r.e. just recently completed two installs in the Netherlands amounting to 71MWp that it stated are the biggest floating PV plants outside of Asia.

It was introduced last month that Hanwha Solutions safeguarded an offer to acquire RES Méditerranée, a RES-owned renewables development and construction company that has a pipeline in France of 5GW of utility-scale solar, onshore wind and also storage space projects.