France to Set 1GW Annual Offshore Wind Tendering Target

France will increase its offshore wind tendering target from around 600MW a year to 1GW a year until 2028 as the Dunkirk tender has shown that the costs are decreasing, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said.

”Today, the project off Dunkirk shows that costs fall even faster when projects are well set up,” Prime Minister Philippe said in a Policy Statement to the National Assembly.

”We will be able to increase the pace of future calls for tenders to one gigawatt per year. It’s a good thing for the price of electricity, for our industry and for our planet!”

The recently released Multiannual Energy Programme (Programmation pluriannuelle de l’énergie (PPE)) has called for the tendering of around 6GW of fixed and floating offshore wind by 2028, including the ongoing Dunkirk tender.

The current target suggests an expected bidding rhythm of between 540MW and 665MW per year by 2024, which from 2025 to 2028 would decrease to 500MW a year.

Under the current PPE, France would have 2.4GW of operating offshore wind capacity by 2023, and between 4.7GW and 5.2GW of operating capacity by 2028.

These targets were labeled as not ambitious enough by the representatives of the French coastal regions and by the industry.

Currently, France has 2MW of offshore wind capacity in operation, with six projects with a combined capacity of around 3GW approved and ready to be built.