Monitoring Offshore Wind Turbines - A science-environment-society observatory

In 2022, the first wind turbines were installed off the French coast, with more to follow.

The EOLENMER project, funded by the French Energy Agency (Ademe), aims at understanding the interaction between wind farms, the marine environment and the surrounding territories, which are currently sources of tension at certain sites. The project seeks to establish an interdisciplinary research framework, similar to an observatory, to monitor the installation and development of the first offshore wind farms and analyze their bio-socio-spatial impacts.

This project brings together more than fifty researchers, geographically dispersed and affiliated with various French research organizations (CNRS, France Energies Marines, IFREMER, IRD, Universities). It covers four maritime regions and will monitor six sites: in the English Channel (Fécamp, Courseulles, Saint-Brieuc), in the North and south Atlantic (Groix-Belle-Ile, Saint-Nazaire), and in the Mediterranean (Leucate, and more broadly, the strategic planning of floating wind turbines).

It consists of three modules:

i/ A Territorial Diagnosis: This work package consists of a baseline assessment of selected sites, analyzing the challenges of offshore wind energy and the local stakeholders' dynamics.

ii/ Thematic Monitoring: This work package relies on current scientific approaches in various fields in order to analyze and monitor the relationship between wind farms and the marine, terrestrial, and local environments (e.g., employment, tourism, fishing, land value, landscape), ideally on an annual basis.

iii/ Open, Interdisciplinary, and Participatory Monitoring: More experimental in its approach, this work package explores, with non-academic actors from local communities or relevant industries (e.g., science shops, art-science collaborations), debated dimensions of the relationships between wind farms and their environment.

The overall objective of the project is to identify and follow the issues raised by the development of offshore wind turbines (diagnosis), to measure and monitor the evolution of these issues (thematic monitoring), and to open up and problematize the methods through which issues are assessed, when these have become controversial (open monitoring). The work will result in annual reports, scientific publications, and presentations at scientific conferences. It will also experiment with new forms of writing and dissemination, in collaboration with non-academic stakeholders, to make its findings accessible to a wider public.

Our presentation will detail this project and introduce first results.