France Switches On the World's First "Nature-Inclusive" Floating Wind Farm

Off the Mediterranean coast of southern France, a new kind of wind farm has begun feeding clean electricity into the grid — and it was built to help the sea as well as the climate. On May 4, 2026, the developer Ocean Winds announced first power from the Éoliennes Flottantes du Golfe du Lion (EFGL), located about 16 kilometres off the port town of Port-La Nouvelle. The project is billed as the world's first "nature-inclusive" floating wind farm.

The engineering is striking in itself. Rather than being fixed to the seabed, the farm's three turbines — each rated at 10 megawatts — sit atop floating platforms anchored in deep water, a design that opens up vast ocean areas too deep for conventional offshore wind. Together they are expected to generate around 110,000 megawatt-hours a year, enough to power roughly 50,000 residents for two decades, while requiring no fuel and emitting nothing as they run.

What sets EFGL apart is what hangs beneath the waterline. The platforms are fitted with artificial reef structures, called Biohut, designed by a local French company to give juvenile fish and other marine life places to shelter and feed. Instead of treating the turbines as intrusions, the project turns them into scaffolding for biodiversity — an attempt to prove that energy infrastructure and ocean life can share the same water.

The honest scale check is important: at 30 megawatts, EFGL is a demonstration project, a fraction of the gigawatt-scale farms now planned across Europe. Its real value lies in what it proves. Floating turbines work in the deep Mediterranean, French suppliers can build them — 85% of the direct suppliers were French — and the structures can host marine habitats rather than harm them. As the world races to expand clean power, EFGL offers a hopeful template: a future where the machines that fight climate change also give the ocean somewhere to thrive.