Carrefour Property Taps Greenvolt Next for 25 MWp Solar Carport Rollout at Up to 120 French Stores

Greenvolt Next has been selected by Carrefour Property to install photovoltaic carports over car parks at up to 120 Carrefour stores in France, in a partnership covering approximately 25 MWp of generating capacity.

The deal, signed between the decentralised energy specialist, part of Greenvolt Group, and the retail property arm of the French supermarket group, is expected to involve around 45,000 solar panels mounted above car parks that are fully owned by Carrefour.

Greenvolt Next to Oversee Store-by-Store Rollout

The rollout will be deployed primarily across central France, with installations tailored individually to each host store rather than delivered as a single large-scale project.

The agreement is described as long-term and positions Greenvolt Next as responsible for the assets from first study through to everyday operation.

How a National Tender Shaped the Partnership

The origins of the deal lie in a nationwide tender launched by Carrefour Property. The tender sought a partner capable of developing, financing, constructing, operating, and maintaining photovoltaic carports across the retailer's portfolio of owned car parks in France.

Greenvolt Next's selection under that competitive process resulted in the agreement now announced. For the company, winning the tender was presented as validation of how it structures its commercial and industrial offering.

Gino Gauthier, CEO of Distributed Generation Business at Greenvolt Next, said the company's fully integrated approach and its capacity to deliver a turnkey solution, combining financing, development, construction, and long-term operation, enabled it to help Carrefour Property accelerate its energy transition with solutions it characterised as both technically robust and economically efficient.

The turnkey scope means Greenvolt Next will carry the full lifecycle of the carport programme: financing, studies, development, construction, operation, and maintenance. Responsibility for long-term running of the installations, not just their construction, sits with the Greenvolt side of the partnership.

Fitting Solar Canopies Into Working Car Parks

A central feature of the scheme is that no two installations will be identical. Greenvolt Next said each system will be adapted to the operational and technical specificities of its host store.

Variables to be factored in include car park layouts, underground utilities, customer traffic, the need to keep stores trading without disruption, grid connection requirements, and permitting.

The stated objective is for all electricity generated to be consumed locally by the store itself. That emphasis on on-site self-consumption distinguishes the programme from solar developments built chiefly to export power to the grid.

By sizing and shaping each carport around the layout and operating conditions of the store beneath it, the partners aim for the output to directly serve the store's own electricity demand.

The estimated annual production is expected to cover a significant share of the electricity consumption of the stores involved, according to the announcement.

Decarbonising Real Estate Toward a 2030 Goal

For Carrefour, the carport programme is tied to wider corporate targets. The company said the initiative is expected to contribute to the decarbonisation of Carrefour Property's real estate assets and to the group's objective of consuming 100% renewable energy at Group level by the end of 2030.

Evan Linker, Global Energy Director at Carrefour, said the agreement allows the retailer to accelerate the integration of photovoltaic production across its French real estate portfolio while improving the experience of its customers and supporting the energy transition of its stores.

He added that, beyond the environmental impact, the partnership delivers long-term financial predictability and reinforces the company's broader sustainability commitments.

The scheme effectively turns existing, already-developed land and store car parks into generation sites, an approach the announcement presents as a natural fit for retail estates with large parking areas.

Greenvolt Frames the Deal Within a European Strategy

At the group level, the agreement was positioned as evidence of the reach of Greenvolt's decentralised generation platform.

João Manso Neto, CEO of Greenvolt Group, said the partnership with Carrefour Property reflects the strength of the Greenvolt Next platform across Europe.

He noted the company's direct experience delivering similar projects with other major retail players and said this gives Greenvolt a proven model that it applies in each market as it supports large-scale players in their energy transition.

The comments place the Carrefour programme within a broader distributed generation strategy, in which the car parks of retail chains serve as a recurring site type for canopy-mounted solar generation, essentially rooftop-style installations built over parking rather than over buildings.

The Numbers Behind the Programme

The scale of the planned deployment is substantial for a carport scheme. Approximately 25 MWp of installed capacity is to be spread across as many as 120 sites, supported by an estimated 45,000 photovoltaic panels.

The car parks concerned are all fully owned by Carrefour and are located primarily in central France. It is worth noting the framing of the announcement itself: the deployment is described as expected rather than complete, and both the number of sites and the panel count are presented as estimates.

The announcement did not provide construction timelines, the total investment value, or details of the financing structure.

A Busy Period for the Wider Group

The Carrefour agreement was published alongside a series of other recent announcements from Greenvolt Group, pointing to activity across several business lines.

Items listed on the company's news page include an agreement to sell two battery storage projects in Poland to A&R Investments, USD 316.69 million in financing secured for a 253.1 MW wind project in Romania, and the start of construction on one of Europe's largest battery energy storage projects.

Within that wider portfolio, the work for Carrefour Property sits in Greenvolt Next's distributed generation business, which serves commercial and industrial customers with decentralised renewable energy solutions.

The French retail programme now stands as one of the more visible expressions of that business, pairing a national retail estate with a single turnkey provider across financing, construction, and long-term operation.