France trims Q3 rates for solar power

Rooftop solar system in France. Author: David TREBOSC. License: Creative Commons, Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

France is again reducing the tariffs for purchase of electricity from small solar photovoltaic (PV) systems connecting to the grid in the third quarter of 2016.

Rooftop systems will see the greatest reduction with 4% down quarter-on-quarter.

Details on the new rates are given in the table below, as released by energy regulator Commission de Regulation de l'Energie (CRE).

Type	Capacity	Rates for June-September 2016
building integrated	0-9 kW	EUR 0.2429/kWh
rooftop 1	0-36 kW	EUR 0.1272/kWh
rooftop 2	36-100 kW	EUR 0.1213/kWh
not-integrated or ground-mounted	0-12 MW	EUR 0.0565/kWh

At 20 MWp in the second quarter of 2016, requests for grid-connection of building-integrated arrays smaller or equal in capacity to 9 kWp fell by about 16% both in quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year terms, said CRE. Tariffs for this category go down by 1.5%.

CRE further said connection applications for simplified building-integrated or rooftop systems with capacities lower or equal to 100 kWp stood at 89 MWp in the second quarter. This marks an increase of over 3.3 times over the year-ago period, and a more modest 3.48% growth from the preceding quarter.

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