Nicolas Barré, editorial director of "Echos" returns to the call for tenders launched by the State for the construction of a maritime wind farm.

A renewable energy which becomes more and more profitable with technological progress. 

It is a gigantic call for tenders that the State launches for the construction of a wind farm at sea. Despite the opposition, the government wants to accelerate.

Yes, because thanks to technological progress, this source of energy becomes profitable, even without public aid.

This is what the United Kingdom is proving today, which is by far the European champion in this area.

Already more than 10% of British electricity comes from these enormous offshore wind turbines, each blade of which is the length of an Airbus A380.

And the English will quadruple their fleet by 2030, it will then reach 40 gigawatts, or the equivalent of 40 nuclear units.

For a cost of electricity now quite competitive.

This is why the British example inspires the rest of Europe.

In France, projects are launched, but things are not progressing.

No, the first calls for tenders were launched, you can imagine, in 2011, ten years ago, but no offshore wind turbines are still running.

We are in France, there are many avenues of appeal, they allow this type of project to be delayed for years.

So on the strength of these unfortunate experiences, the legislation was revised to speed up procedures.

This call for tenders launched by the State, the 8th in ten years, will benefit from these legislative advances.

It concerns 1000 megawatts, the equivalent of a large nuclear reactor.

And despite the opposition of fishermen who are worried about the impact of these giant wind turbines on marine life, three other major projects are in the pipeline, one in Brittany, another off the Ile d'Oléron in Charente- Maritime and one in the Mediterranean.

Projects that interest all energy giants.

Of course, including the big oil groups like Total or Shell who want to diversify into non-carbon energies. This is the energy transition. It is the birth of a new industrial sector with thousands of jobs at stake. But the fact is that today, French wind power plants, in Cherbourg or Saint Nazaire, produce mainly for our neighbors. The environmentalists who extol the virtues of the energy transition in the morning are sometimes the same as those who then block these projects: they are not with one contradiction.