Sandrine Prioul // Photo credit: GLAZ / Remi Lemenicier / Hemis.f / hemis.fr / Hemis via AFP 7:08 a.m., March 16, 2024
What if in Claude Monet's paintings, the rocks of Belle-île or the Birvideaux lighthouse were now dotted with several dozen offshore wind turbines?
The project, which has local residents screaming, particularly in Quiberon, is one of the 50 wind farms wanted by Emmanuel Macron by 2050 to satisfy energy sovereignty.
What if emblematic landscapes of Brittany, immortalized by the greatest painters, were now dotted with 20, 40 or up to 120 wind turbines, depending on the projects?
This is a possibility that Gildas Gouarin and his friends from the Gardien du Large association refuse to imagine, which is why they are going to the front.
“For France, this is a profound error”
"We can clearly see Belle-île. Imagine that the wind turbines will be exactly on the axis of Claude Monet's paintings. Over there, you have the Birvidaux lighthouse, 24 meters high. The wind turbines will be seven and a half times higher. They will stay a little further away of course, but they will appear five times higher than the lighthouse,” he explains.
A bronca supported by the former minister, François Goulard.
Attached to his Morbihan coastline, elected official Horrizon questions more broadly the relevance of such a radical commitment in favor of wind power.
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“That the Germans are doing offshore wind power, along the Baltic or the North Sea, where there is not much in terms of landscape quality, that can be understood. But for France , this is a profound error.”
Engineers, fishermen, former EDF workers and politicians who guarantee the preservation of these classified landscapes, all these rebels say they hear the talk of energy sovereignty, but ask the government to review its project of 50 offshore wind farms.