In the Landes forest, Europe’s largest solar power plant will destroy 1,000 hectares of pines

“Look! vsThis means that there will be solar panels everywhere on both sides of the road. To me, it makes me sick! » Claudine clings to her steering wheel and drives down a long forest road. The landscape is somewhat boring. Aligned rows of pines, of different ages depending on the plot, sometimes give way to wastelands. We are in Saucats, a town of 3,300 inhabitants, twenty kilometers south of Bordeaux. In the coming years, this aspect of the Landes de Gascogne forest may change radically. The cause is called Horizeo, named after the project of the companies Engie and Neoen, supported by the Electricity Transmission Network (RTE), which dreams of setting up a photovoltaic power station here. Objective: Work will commence in two years to commence in 2026. A thousand hectares of solar panels, but also storage batteries and, a hydrogen production site, at the cost of significant deforestation. We are not talking about a simple sector: the area involved is bigger than XV^e District of Paris. If the project goes through, it will be nothing short of Europe’s largest solar power plant.

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