Support for Solar Photovoltaic in France – A Shift towards Capacity Market Mechanism

France promoted the deployment of solar photovoltaic through the use of the most widespread type of support among EU countries, the feed-in tariff, combined with feed-in premium and tendering system. This paper overviewed the French historic framework of the support for this technology as well as the way in which this support changed quantitatively over period 2002-2017. The paper provides insight to the relationship between the amount of incentives granted, the average tariffs, the final renewable electricity generated from this technology and its installed capacity through an indicative analysis that reveals a positive/no patterns/negative correlation in short term (incentives versus the production of incentivized energy), as well as in long term (incentives versus the installed capacity). Feed-in tariff scheme gave the real uptake for solar photovoltaic in France, which had the intended effect of the policies that were introduced to promote it. We found that 1% increase in the amount of support for solar photovoltaics in France during period 2005-2016 has contributed to an increase by 0.6% in the installed capacity of this technology. Further we found that the incentives for solar photovoltaics given from tendering system decreased the most over years compared with the incentives from regular feed-in tariffs. The insight analysis shows that indicators as gross domestic production, CO
₂
emissions, spot electricity prices, households' electricity prices, unitary feed-in tariff through regular and tendering system are important to define the trend of the solar photovoltaic capacity in France. The combination between feed-in tariffs and tendering system produced in 2011 the largest additional capacity over the period under analysis. Overall, the analysis shows that the French supporting policies for photovoltaic have been effective in promoting this technology.