France’s first offshore wind turbine, the floating FloatGen prototype, is on track to start flowing power at full throttle later this summer, following repair of a defect in the export cable linking the test site in the Bay of Biscay to the onshore grid.

Hook-up of the flagship, a first-of-a-kind concrete ‘damping pool’ platform topped with a 2MW Vestas V80 turbine, has gone “to plan”, Ideol chief marketing officer Bruno Geschier told Recharge on a trip offshore to view the unit, and early performance indicators at the site some 22km off Brittany – including coping with five-metre waves and 15-metre per second winds – have been “excellent”.