Dozens of offshore wind turbines will soon flourish on the French coasts. Emmanuel Macron announced this Tuesday that the government would launch a huge call for tenders in 2025 for the installation of offshore wind farms. “In 2025, we will already launch ten gigawatts, that is to say around ten of parks which will come into force in 2030-2035,” declared the Head of State during the maritime economy conference in Nantes.
Today, France has 8 gigawatts (GW) of offshore parks installed or planned, or sixteen in total, but only one park is in production. This is the Saint-Nazaire site (Loire-Atlantique), with an installed capacity of 480 megawatts (MW), whose 80 wind turbines have been operating at full capacity since November 2022. The Breton park of Saint-Brieuc (Côtes-d ‘Armor), in Brittany, hotly contested, and that of Fécamp (Seine-Maritime), in Normandy, are in the process of being finalized. The first must be put into service in December, the second during the winter of 2023-2024.
In 2024, the first pilot farms of floating wind turbines must also be installed, with three wind turbines each. One off the Gulf of Fos (Bouches-du-Rhône), then two others off the Occitan coast, at Leucate-Le Barcarès (Aude and Pyrénées-Orientales) and at Gruissan (Aude). Then, if all goes well, it will be the turn of the offshore wind projects installed in Courseulles-sur-Mer (Calvados) and the islands of Yeu and Noirmoutier (Vendée), currently under construction, to be put into service in 2025. The Dieppe-Le Tréport project (Seine-Maritime) must be commissioned in 2026. That of Dunkirk (North) in 2028.
Others are still in the project phase. For example, the Center Manche 1 and Center Manche 2 parks, which will be located off the coast of Normandy, but whose exact location has not yet been defined. They must be commissioned in the early 2030s. Another offshore wind farm must also be built off the South Atlantic coast during this period. Likewise, three floating wind farms are due to come into operation at the start of the next decade: one in southern Brittany and two off the Mediterranean.
Emmanuel Macron’s announcements this Tuesday are part of the French energy-climate strategy, put out for public consultation last week – for a period of one month – by the Minister of Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher. On offshore wind power, it plans to “accelerate the pace of allocation of offshore wind power capacities to target 18 GW of installed power in 2035, by developing planning by seafront, by launching in 2025 the allocation of 10 GW of power and continuing the development of the floating wind sector. Thus, this means that the location of the ten new wind farms mentioned by Emmanuel Macron this Tuesday is not yet defined. Public debates on the planning of wind power on each of the four French maritime facades will be launched this Wednesday by the minister in Nantes, on the sidelines of the Conference on the Economy of the Sea, specifies the office of Agnès Pannier-Runacher.
