France’s first floating wind turbine, the 2MW FloatGen, has been inaugurated in the west coast port of Saint-Nazaire.

The flagship – developed by French outfit Ideol and built by civil engineers Bouygues Travaux Publics (BTP) under a €25m ($29.6m) EU technology accelerator programme – will head out in the coming weeks for the SEM-REV ocean-energy test site off Brittany for a two-year trial, with wheels already turning on a multi-gigawatt pipeline of projects using the design off Ireland, the UK, Japan, Taiwan and France.