Provence Grand Large, Leucate, Gruissan and Groix: names assured a place in the great maritime adventure being written by the floating wind sector. Together representing a humble 100MW of seaborne power, the four pilot projects could nonetheless be transformative for the wind industry, opening up the world’s deeper waters — the vast majority of the globe’s oceanic acreage — to an industry that is already planning to build 400GW of fixed-bottom offshore capacity in the next 30 years.
Floating wind — easily tailorable to varying water depths, low-cost to install, well-suited to serial construction quayside — could change the economics for a sector on the cusp of global industrialisation as its levelised cost of energy (LCoE) becomes competitive with mainstream power sources.
