Impacts of Climate Change on the Offshore Wind Industry in Metropolitan France: Insights from the 2C NOW Project

Abstract. The offshore wind energy sector in France is poised for significant growth, with ambitious targets to install 18 GW of offshore capacity by 2035 and 45 GW by 2050. This expansion is crucial for achieving France’s goal of generating 20 % of its electricity from offshore wind by 2050. The 2C NOW project, led by France Energies Marines, investigates the impact of climate change on metocean conditions along France’s three maritime fronts (two representative points for each seafront). This is critical in the context of sector development, which aims to support long-term energy transition goals and the sustainability of wind farms over several decades. Using global climate models from the CMIP6 project (IPCC), a statistical downscaling of the datasets is performed using the CDF-t method (Michelangeli et al., 2009) based on the best available numerical reanalyses (selected using extensive in-situ data). The mean conditions show a general decrease in wind speed and wave height (multi-model average) for all SSP scenarios and for all seafronts in continental France. This downward trend is more significant for the long-term future period (horizon 2100), on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. These average trends are nevertheless accompanied by strong model uncertainties. Regarding extreme conditions, an increase in extreme values of significant wave height is observed for the future climate scenarios, while there is less consensus on the wind speed. Water levels show significant increasing trends, regardless of the seafront or the conditions concerned.