Big infrastructure projects normally fall apart for reasons you can see coming. The money dries up, a court freezes the permit, the local objections pile up, or the hardware turns out not to survive contact with the real world.<\/p>\n
France has a tidal power project in Normandy that has cleared every one of those, and it still cannot start.<\/p>\n
It is called FloWatt, and it is designed to put six turbines on the seabed about two miles off the Cotentin peninsula, in a strait where sailing directions warn that the current can run harder than most yachts can sail against it.<\/p>\n
The concession is granted. The permits are signed. The French state has committed \u20ac75 million and the European Union another \u20ac20 million. The shipyard that will weld the machines together sits 20 miles up the coast in Cherbourg.<\/p>\n
On July 1 the people building it wrote an open letter to the prime minister to say that none of that is enough. One document is missing, it has been missing since January, and until it appears nothing moves.<\/p>\n
The site is the Raz Blanchard, which English charts call the Alderney Race. It is the gap between Cap de la Hague, at the northwest tip of the Cotentin, and the Channel Island of Alderney. “Raz” is the French word for exactly this kind of tidal race, and this is the one everybody else is measured against.<\/p>\n
Published in-situ measurements from the site put spring-tide flows at up to about 5 meters per second, a shade over 11 mph. Navigation guides for the passage cite worse: close to 12 knots, roughly 14 mph, at the strongest point on equinoctial tides.<\/p>\n
Eleven miles an hour does not sound like much until you remember that seawater is around 800 times denser than air. A tidal rotor in an 11 mph current is being pushed by more mass per second than a wind turbine sees in a serious storm, and it happens four times a day, on a timetable set by the Moon rather than the weather.<\/p>\n
That is the entire commercial argument for tidal. It is the only renewable whose output you can put in a spreadsheet years ahead and be right.<\/p>\n
FloWatt is developed by HydroQuest, a turbine company based near Grenoble, and Qair, an independent renewables producer. The machines are built by Constructions M\u00e9caniques de Normandie, the Cherbourg yard better known for naval and patrol vessels.<\/p>\n
The farm is six HQ 2.8 turbines at 2.8 megawatts each<\/a>, for 17 MW total. The developers call it the most powerful tidal farm ever deployed, and on the numbers that holds up: the biggest array actually running today is MeyGen off northern Scotland, at 6 MW across four turbines<\/a>.<\/p>\n The HydroQuest design is not a wind turbine dropped underwater. It uses paired vertical shafts with counter-rotating three-bladed rotors inside a metal frame, and it works in both directions, so it does not have to swing around when the tide reverses. The US Department of Energy’s marine energy device database lists the second-generation unit at 21 meters tall and 26 meters across.<\/p>\n Each one sits 30 to 35 meters down, roughly 3 km from shore, invisible from land. The whole array occupies a concession of 0.28 square kilometers. Design life is 25 years, and HydroQuest’s pitch rests on a 1 MW prototype it ran at the Paimpol-Br\u00e9hat test site in Brittany between 2019 and 2021, which the company says logged 100% availability across two years in the water.<\/p>\n It is not the only project in that stretch of sea. A second pilot, NH1, run by Normandie Hydroliennes, plans four Proteus AR3000 turbines at 3 MW apiece for 12 MW and 33.9 GWh a year. The two of them split \u20ac51 million from the EU Innovation Fund<\/a> in the 2023 call, and they will share the same trench for the cable back to shore.<\/p>\n France published its third multiannual energy plan, the PPE3, as decree 2026-76 on February 12, with the text landing in the Journal Officiel the following day. Tidal made the cut for the first time: a 250 MW tender to be awarded by 2030, with a ceiling price of \u20ac160 per megawatt-hour in 2024 money.<\/p>\n The FloWatt partners welcomed it in a statement on February 27<\/a>, describing the project as validated and secured, with financial close scheduled for 2026 and commissioning at the end of 2028.<\/p>\n Here is the gap. Before the electricity from a pilot farm can be paid a supported price, Paris has to notify the aid scheme to the European Commission. Only after that can it publish the arr\u00eat\u00e9 tarifaire, the decree that actually fixes the top-up payment on each megawatt-hour. That notification was expected in January. It has not happened.<\/p>\n Without a price, there is no final investment decision. Without a final investment decision, the banks do not lend. Without the banks, the yard does not start cutting steel. Two pilot farms representing close to 30 MW are sitting on that one line item.<\/p>\n So on July 1, Guirec Dufour, president of FloWatt SAS and managing director of Qair France, and Drew Blaxland, president of Normandie Hydroliennes SAS, sent an open letter to prime minister S\u00e9bastien Lecornu<\/a>, copied to five ministers.<\/p>\n Twenty-eight other companies and figures in French marine renewables co-signed it. Their argument is that the decision to back tidal was already taken, examined and written into law, and that every month of delay weakens the industrial base built around it.<\/p>\n The timing is what stings for the tidal people. On June 12, the French government published the specifications for AO10<\/a>, its tenth offshore wind tender, covering 11 zones and roughly 10 GW split evenly between fixed-bottom and floating. Bids close on October 12 and the winners are expected early in 2027.<\/p>\n That is a far more complicated piece of administration than a tariff decree for two pilot farms, and it went out on schedule. The wind tender is more than 300 times the capacity of the tidal projects still waiting on a price.<\/p>\n None of which means anyone is being obstructed on purpose. Energy files move at the speed of the ministry handling them, and a 10 GW auction has a political sponsor in a way that 29 MW of experimental machinery does not.<\/p>\n There is a reason this matters on the other side of the Atlantic, and it is not solidarity with Normandy.<\/p>\n Ocean Renewable Power Company, based in Portland, Maine, is developing the East Foreland Tidal Energy Project in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, which the National Renewable Energy Laboratory reckons holds about a third of the United States’ total tidal power. ORPC filed a draft pilot license application with FERC last year and is working under the American Tidal Energy Project<\/a>, backed by the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office.<\/p>\n WPTO put $6 million into a first phase across two marine energy projects, $3 million of it into the Cook Inlet work, with up to $29 million available to whichever of the two carries on. ORPC picked two technologies for the site: its own TidGen system, and the Proteus AR Series. That is the same turbine family going into NH1, next door to FloWatt.<\/p>\n So the hardware question is being answered in Europe, in the Pentland Firth and now the Raz Blanchard, and the American program is buying into the results. The question France is currently failing to answer is the other one, and it is the one that decides whether any of this reaches a grid: what is the power worth, and who signs for it.<\/p>\n Be careful with the dates on this project. FloWatt’s own February statement says commissioning at the end of 2028. In May, at the Seanergy conference in Paris, HydroQuest’s head of business development Guillaume Gr\u00e9au said the farm was tracking to 2029<\/a>, which would still leave 12 months of operating data before the 250 MW tender is awarded.<\/p>\n Financial close was supposed to be a 2026 event, and 2026 is now more than half gone with the enabling decree still unpublished. Nothing has been reported since the July 1 letter to suggest the notification has reached Brussels.<\/p>\n Tidal has been here before. A previous pilot farm at the Raz Blanchard, run by Naval Group, was abandoned in 2018, and the sector spent years arguing that the technology was the problem. Orbital’s floating turbines, running in Orkney and now cleared for Canada’s Bay of Fundy<\/a>, and the consented schemes off Wales<\/a> have made that a harder case to argue.<\/p>\n Everything else on this project has a date attached that has already moved at least once. The tide is the only part of it running exactly on the schedule it was handed, twice a day, whether or not anyone in Paris signs anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Big infrastructure projects normally fall apart for reasons you can see coming. The money dries up, a court freezes the … <\/p>\nEverything is signed except one arr\u00eat\u00e9<\/h2>\n
Offshore wind got 10 gigawatts in June<\/h2>\n
Alaska is running the same experiment with a third of America’s tidal power<\/h2>\n
2028, 2029, or whenever the decree lands<\/h2>\n