S.E.R.G. WP Series #13-2025: "Ground-Mounted Solar and The Impact of Land-Use Planning: Evidence from France"

2025 - Nicholas Hatem

This paper provides novel evidence on how land-use regulation impacts the deploy- ment of solar photovoltaic installations in France. Solar energy projects must meet eligibility criteria to participate in renewable energy auctions, based on the land used by the installation. Eligibility criteria, in turn, are transposed in land-use planning at the municipality level. Using an event study, I investigate how this interaction impacts the amount of land allocated to solar. My findings suggest that the fragmentation and heterogeneity of land-use planning may distort the spatial deployment of solar. Municipalities with more detailed land-use planning increase the amount of land allocated to solar by an average of 1,000 m2 per km2 of land eligible for new developments. Conversely, more recent land-use planning and frameworks integrated at the inter-municipality level reduce the amount of land by -1,500 m2 per km2, due to stricter restrictions on new land developments.

Land-use regulation; Land-use planning; Policy decentralization; Renewable energy auctions; Solar photovoltaic; Staggered difference-in-differences.