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“Conquering the Sea: Offshore Wind Planning in France (2009–2025)” 

Supervised by François-Mathieu Poupeau.

This thesis tells the story of a conquest: that of energy on the sea. Since the early 2000s, offshore wind power has sought to develop in France, evolving from a supplementary technology geared towards export to a true, widespread pillar of the electricity mix (45GW by 2050). The electricity sector has developed, structured around stakeholders and institutions that share common standards, values and a very specific objective: to make French offshore wind power a reality within the context of an increasingly urgent energy transition.

But the sea is not an empty space: largely unknown to the energy sector, it is home to a diverse array of activities ranging from transport and fishing to the navy and porpoises: it is a whole range of sectors that have existed there for decades, even centuries, and with which we must now contend on a daily basis. And the maritime sector, which is central to maritime planning, has no intention of standing idly by whilst the fifty or so planned wind farms are established: from direct action to negotiations over corridors and appeals to the President of the Republic, public action on offshore energy must therefore cooperate with another sector whose values, standards and balance of power are substantially different.

At the heart of the analysis lies offshore wind planning, which was placed on the political agenda in the early 2020s and keeps the State and stakeholders working daily towards two objectives: developing wind power (1) and establishing it at sea (2). In this context, one factor is essential: no one claims exclusive use of the sea. Consequently, the conquest is not a trench war: on the contrary, it is negotiated, translated and (re)politicised. Far from being confined to a single technical-economic prism, a mere ‘resource’, the planning of offshore wind power is also a matter of governance and of mobilising heterogeneous networks of stakeholders. To understand how, in 2022, 40GW could be announced and how the issue of access to space could be institutionalised to become the defining challenge of the first half of the 2020s, we examined the state’s capacity to organise itself internally and externally to meet its objectives. What emerges is the gradual emergence of a coalition of ‘builders’ – from the energy and maritime sectors – acting to promote the conditions for specific planning and to implement it across the country.

The thesis is based on 137 interviews conducted at national level (ministers, ministerial departments, central government bodies, operators, industrialists, environmental associations) and regional level (decentralised state services, elected representatives, fishermen, environmental associations). It also draws on several areas of observation (public debates; central government).