France

With the 200 hydrogen bikes offered to journalists and world leaders at the G7 summit in Biarritz, France proving popular, manufacturer Pragma Industries has received an order for 1,000 of them from Chilean president Sebastian Pinera. The company’s founder, Pierre Forté, wants the bike to have a societal impact in developing countries.

Engie has raised eyebrows with the installation of several solar benches in Biarritz, southwestern France, as a local official has asked citizens to avoid sitting on them for long periods of time in order to keep their energy yield up. But the authorities over in Cannes are clearly impressed, as the municipal government in the French Riviera resort town has also revealed plans to buy more of the PV benches, which are designed by Croatian startup Include.

Toulouse-based startup Sunbirds has set up an office, assembly workshop and maintenance centre in Brisbane. The company is providing solar-powered drones and drone-as-a-service solutions to surveyors, cattle stations and environmental monitoring companies.

Using a VPP to regulate thousands of data points according to price signals can enable generation asset owners to take care of their systems within seconds and with very high granularity.

The French government has devised three possible scenarios for the planned phasing out of part of its nuclear power generation assets. Even under the most optimistic scenario, the target to reduce the share of nuclear power from around 75% to 50% by 2025, which had been set by the previous government, will only be reached in 2035. The most pessimistic scenario envisages the construction of four new nuclear reactors by 2040.

Four years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels. The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then. The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit underwhelming.

Through the listing on the French stock market, the independent power producer hopes to raise enough capital to increase its renewable energy assets from 2 GW to 5 GW. Impala intends to subscribe to the offering and remain majority shareholder.

French energy giant, EDF has announced a plan to develop 30 GW of solar projects in France between 2020 and 2035.