Posted on September 24, 2025
TotalEnergies SE and RWE AG have won a French government tender to build the country’s largest offshore wind farm at the start of the coming decade, a €4.5 billion ($5.3 billion) project off the coast of Normandy.
Centre Manche 2 is Total’s largest project in France for more than three decades, a 1.5 gigawatt operation in the English Channel that will provide green electricity to the equivalent of over 1 million households from 2033.
Though RWE plans to ultimately exit, the French company has said it will press ahead and seek an alternative partner. A final investment decision on the project is due in early 2029, Total said on Wednesday.
The facility will produce power at a guaranteed price of €66 per megawatt-hour, the government said in a separate statement. The contract includes clauses that would adjust that level to account for some cost inflation.
A breakthrough for Total in the French offshore market, the announcement is a setback for Electricite de France SA. The state-owned utility, along with its partners, has won six of the 11 offshore wind projects tendered by the government in the years since 2012, including the adjacent Centre Manche 1, currently under development.
Total has said that suppliers, particularly for wind turbines and electrical cables, will be mostly European.
Elsewhere in the country, however, a separate tender for a 1-gigawatt wind farm off the Oleron island in the Atlantic Ocean failed due to a lack of bids — the first such miss in France — even after the government shortlisted nine potential groups.
Auctions have struggled across Europe, however, as bidders turn cautious in the face of rising costs that have forced some developers to book losses, and even abandon multi-billion dollar projects. Several companies are also grappling with US project cancellations ordered by President Donald Trump.
Another challenge is that the most obvious locations for wind farms at sea have already been taken in earlier rounds. At Oleron 1, the water depth, as well as seabed and wind conditions, made the project unviable below the ceiling bid price, according to Guillain Chapelon, managing director at Skyborn Renewables in France. The combination made the failure unsurprising, he wrote on LinkedIn.
The Oleron tender allowed bidders to ask a guaranteed price of as much as €100 per megawatt-hour for the farm output. That’s slightly above the tariffs that EDF, Engie SA and their partners obtained in a French tender last December for two floating wind projects to be built in the Mediterranean Sea in the early 2030s.
Still, the flop will likely force the French administration to remove the Oleron 2 project from a ninth offshore bidding round currently under preparation. Should that tender proceed, it would now entail only three 500-megawatt floating wind farm extensions located close to those recently awarded to groups led by EDF, Engie, and a German-Belgian consortium.
It also threatens French President Emmanuel Macron’s ambition to have 18 gigawatts of wind farms at sea by 2035, up from three gigawatts currently in operation or under construction. Macron even set a target of as much as 45 gigawatts by 2050, which could provide about 20% of the nation’s electricity.
