Description:

Green energy is good but good for who?

The Government is about to launch a call for bids for the construction and operation of 600 wind turbines at 10 sites off the French coast. The project is valued at around €10 billion and is to be completed over the next five years. Earlier this year, the Government indicated that it wants to install 6,000MW of offshore wind capacity by 2020. This first round of turbines will provide 3,000MW of generating capacity at a cost of around €3.5 million per megawatt. 

There is currently about 3,000MW of wind powered generating capacity in France and GDF Suez are at an advanced stage in planning the country’s first offshore wind farm, the 705MW Compagnie du Vent development nine miles off Le Treport in Normandy.

The latest plans include about a dozen other sites in Normandy, Brittany, Languedoc-Roussillon and the Mediterranean and provides more evidence of a shift in the country’s energy strategy away from nuclear towards renewable forms of power generation. Earlier this month a €1.35 billion investment programme was launched to accelerate the development of emerging technologies such as marine power and geothermal energy. Plans are also under way to boost the country's solar energy capacity.

But at a time when we should all be trying to reduce our energy consumption, the French Government appears to be encouraging the opposite and in places that are rich in wildlife and whose economy depends heavily on the sea for both tourism and fishing. One has to ask if all right questions have been answered.

The Normandy coast is particularly rich in birdlife and the developments will put both sea birds and migratory birds at risk. Although it is thought that bird deaths resulting from collisions with turbine blades and towers are relatively low, even low numbers of deaths can be significant for longer lived bird species. The RSPB  believe that birds alter their migratory routes and local flight paths by up to 3 kilometers to avoid wind farms and have to use considerably more energy to reach their nesting grounds.

At present there is around 320MW of wind powered generating capacity in Normandy (140MW in Upper Normandy and 180MW in Lower Normandy) compared with almost 500MW in Brittany. For the future, it appears that Lower Normandy in particular is going to be severely affected.

If you have any comments on this subject, why not use the My Guide facility to express your views.