President Emmanuel Macron will attend the 2nd “North Sea Summit” in Ostend, Belgium, on April 24, where he will discuss increasing cooperation to accelerate the deployment of offshore renewable energy, the Elysée Palace announced Thursday.
France, which did not participate in the first edition of this meeting in May 2022 in Denmark, will find around the table Germany, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Norway and the United Kingdom. Last year, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put the issue of energy supply security back at the center of the game, an agreement was reached between the four stakeholders (Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium) to make the North Sea the “green powerhouse of Europe”, notably by increasing offshore wind energy capacity in the region tenfold by 2050.
France, for its part, has set itself “the objective of installing 40 GW of offshore wind power by 2050, i.e. about fifty farms combining land-based and floating technologies”, as the Elysée reminds us. For the time being, France has only inaugurated one offshore wind farm in Saint-Nazaire, with 80 wind turbines that should provide the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of 700,000 people. Three others are under construction, in Saint-Brieuc, Fécamp and Courseulles-sur-Mer.
