EU greenlights €11bn in support for French offshore wind

The European Commission has approved an €11bn ($12.7bn) French Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme that will support the development of floating offshore wind farms.

The Commission announced on Monday that it has approved the scheme, which it described as aligning with the objectives of the Clean Industrial Deal.

That is a plan to reconcile climate protection with industrial competitiveness in a bid to speed up decarbonisation and re-industrialisation in the EU simultaneously.

The Commission adopted the Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework in June to foster support measures in sectors which are key for the transition to a net-zero economy, in line with the Clean Industrial Deal.

The approved state aid will support the construction and operation of three floating offshore wind farms, said the Commission. One will be off the coast of Southern Brittany and two others in the Mediterranean Sea.

Each wind farm will have a capacity of around 500MW and to generate around 2.2TWh, which the Commission said is the equivalent of the annual consumption of 450,000 French households.

The CfD scheme will – as in other countries – see projects bid in an auction for a contract that will see them receive a set price for their power. For the duration of the CfD, where the market price for electricity exceeds the agreed price, the project will pay the difference back to the state, and vice versa.

After its first offshore wind tenders in 2012 and 2014, it took France a decade to get its first offshore wind farms built. But the pace of deployment has picked up now. At the end of last year, France had 1.5GW of turbines in the water.

Only 2GW of that is fixed-bottom, while the remainder is slated to be floating.