Offshore energy lawyer in France: offshore wind, subsea cables and marine operations

An offshore wind farm is a marine construction site before it is a power plant. Foundations arrive by barge, turbines are erected by jack-up vessels chartered by the day, cables are buried by cable-laying ships, maintenance runs from crew transfer vessels, and the whole is connected by RTE, the French transmission system operator, to an offshore substation that the producer does not own. Each of these operations answers to a different body of law, and that is exactly where projects become difficult. The firm approaches these matters with the tools of maritime law, business law and international trade law, which makes it possible to read a time charter for an installation vessel, a grid connection agreement and a turbine supply contract as parts of a single structure. This page complements the firm’s maritime law and international trade law pages.

What offshore energy law covers

The subject starts with legal geography. Within the territorial sea, out to twelve nautical miles, France is sovereign, the seabed belongs to the natural maritime public domain, and an installation is sited there under a concession for use of the maritime public domain (Code général de la propriété des personnes publiques, art. L. 2124-3). Beyond that line, in the exclusive economic zone and on the continental shelf, France exercises only functional jurisdiction: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982 gives the coastal State the exclusive right to authorise and regulate the construction of artificial islands, installations and structures (arts. 56 and 60), and to establish 500-metre safety zones around them, provided navigation and the laying of submarine cables are not impeded (art. 79). Ordinance no. 2016-1687 of 8 December 2016 on maritime spaces transposes this regime into French law. Its article 19 makes French statutes and regulations applicable to installations in the exclusive economic zone as if they stood on metropolitan French territory, and article 20 makes any use of the marine environment there subject to a single permit (autorisation unique).

The distinction is not academic. The first-generation farms at Saint-Nazaire, Fécamp and Saint-Brieuc lie in the territorial sea. The projects of the third multiannual energy programme target the exclusive economic zone, where article L. 219-5-1 of the Environmental Code requires priority zones to be sought “as a priority”. Since Act no. 2023-175 of 10 March 2023, a project straddling both spaces is governed by the territorial-sea rules for all of its permits, and the domain concession then serves as the siting authorisation for the part located in the exclusive economic zone (2016 Ordinance, art. 40-1). The law applicable to the farm, its cables and the vessels serving it therefore depends on the twelve-mile line, which is read on the chart before it is read in the contracts.

From planning to award: the competitive tender

The State selects the zone, the public debates it, the minister launches the tender and the Commission de régulation de l’énergie (CRE) runs it. The sequence is set by article L. 121-8-1 of the Environmental Code: referral to the Commission nationale du débat public, a consultation focused on the location of the candidate zones, opinions from local authorities within one hundred kilometres, then identification of the zones by the minister once the participation report is published. The competitive dialogue cannot begin before that report is released, and the successful bidder is then exempt from any further public participation procedure for its own project. The map of priority zones, drawn up per seaboard for ten years in the strategic seaboard document (Environmental Code, art. L. 219-5-1), is the foundation of this chain.

The current event is tender no. 1/2026, known as AO10, published by the CRE on 20 May 2026 and covering eleven offshore wind projects off Normandy, Brittany, the South Atlantic coast and in the Mediterranean, bottom-fixed and floating. The corrected tender specifications date from 20 August 2026 and bids must be filed by 12 October 2026 at noon, one file per project. The framework is chapter I of title I of book III of the Energy Code: article L. 311-10 sets out the principle, and the contract signed with the winner under article L. 311-12 fixes the remuneration of the electricity produced. That contract can itself be challenged before the Conseil d’État, which shows how far the award is conceived as an administrative act rather than a commercial adjudication.

For a bidder, the difficulty is not understanding the procedure but measuring what it commits to: a commissioning schedule, connection conditions fixed by the specifications, stranded costs in the event of default, industrial-content and environmental commitments that will become the conditions of its permits. The firm assists with the reading of the specifications, the structuring of the bidding group and the negotiation of consortium agreements, keeping in mind that everything promised in the bid ends up in an enforceable title.

Permits: the envelope permit, the single permit and the domain concession

The legislature wanted a farm to be authorised before its technology is frozen. That is the purpose of article L. 181-28-1 of the Environmental Code, introduced by Act no. 2018-727 of 10 August 2018: the permits for an offshore renewable project set variable characteristics within which the project may evolve after they are granted, and their conditions are drafted with those margins in mind. The applicant then informs the authorities of the characteristics of the project as built. This “envelope permit” covers four titles: the single permit of article 20 of the 2016 Ordinance for the exclusive economic zone, the concession for use of the maritime public domain, the environmental permit and the operating licence under the Energy Code. The environmental impact study may be carried out in whole or in part by the minister for energy and made available to the developer, a notable reversal of the usual logic of environmental law.

In the exclusive economic zone the single permit stands in for all the authorisations, declarations, approvals and derogations needed to build, operate and use the installations and their ancillary facilities. It may be conditioned on financial guarantees for making the site safe and restoring it (art. 22), comes with a mandatory marine research programme (art. 24) and gives rise to an annual fee payable to the French biodiversity agency, which the authorities may nonetheless set at zero for the duration of the article L. 311-12 contract for installations awarded through a competitive tender (art. 27). The route of cables on the continental shelf is approved separately (art. 28), with an obligation to remove them at the end of their use.

Litigation over these titles is concentrated. Since 1 January 2024, article R. 311-1-1 of the Code of Administrative Justice gives the Conseil d’État jurisdiction at first and last instance over challenges to the whole set of decisions relating to offshore renewable installations, their connection works up to the first onshore substation and the port infrastructure they require: operating licence, environmental permit, protected-species derogation, domain concession, single permit, the article L. 311-12 contract and decisions taken under the public participation procedure. One court, one instance, a body of case law that builds fast. A court hearing a challenge to the single permit also has the regularisation powers of article L. 181-18 of the Environmental Code (2016 Ordinance, art. 20-1), which makes outright annulment rarer and mid-proceedings regularisation more common.

Grid connection: what RTE owes, what the producer risks

Since 2017, the cost of connecting farms awarded by tender, where the producer does not choose the location of the zone, is borne by the transmission system operator, including stranded costs if the procedure is abandoned; changes requested by the winner remain at its expense, and its default makes it bear stranded costs under the terms of the specifications (Energy Code, art. L. 342-16). The specifications set the date by which the connection must be completed and, if it is late, RTE pays the producer compensation whose scope, calculation and cap are fixed by decree after consulting the CRE (art. L. 342-8, II); damage to or malfunction of the connection works that curtails production also gives rise to compensation (art. L. 342-10). Decree no. 2022-315 of 3 March 2022 sets out that regime. Article L. 342-5 also allows the State, once the map has been published, to ask RTE to start connection studies and works in advance, which decouples the grid timetable from the farm timetable.

This statutory framework has just been completed by a new contractual scheme. By two decisions of 10 September 2026, published on 16 September, the CRE approved the procedure for handling connection requests and the model connection agreement for the offshore wind installations of the PPE3 project group of AO10 (Fécamp grand large 1 to 3, Bretagne Nord-Ouest, Oléron 1, Golfe du Lion Centre 1a, 1b and 2). The agreement is signed in three stages, without a technical and financial proposal, with progressive commitments between RTE and the producer, an evolving liability cap and a clarified treatment of shared substations. RTE had put the model out to public consultation from 10 March to 7 April 2026 before referring it to the CRE on 22 July.

There is as yet no court decision on this three-stage agreement; we reason prospectively. Three questions will certainly arise. The first is how the contractual liability cap fits with the statutory delay compensation, which has neither the same source nor the same ceiling. The second is the shared substation: where several farms share one offshore substation, one farm’s delay or damage to a common structure spills over onto the others, and the allocation of that risk between producers becomes a drafting question. The third is force majeure at sea, which construction contracts, the connection agreement and insurance policies never define in the same way. These are the three points on which the firm concentrates its review of connection agreements.

Building at sea: contracts, vessels and the industrial chain

Building a farm means chaining together contracts that were not written for one another. Turbine supply follows the manufacturer’s templates, the fabrication of foundations and substations falls under EPCI-type industrial contracts, cable laying and turbine installation go through specialised charter parties, often built on the BIMCO SUPPLYTIME or WINDTIME forms, and the whole is topped by interface agreements that allocate delays between packages. A cable-layer’s delay becomes a waiting day invoiced by the installation vessel, which becomes a slip in commissioning, which becomes a connection penalty. Everything is connected. And maritime law then comes in through the vessels, because the jack-up that erects the turbines is time-chartered under an English-law charter party with its own off-hire events, because the cable ship burying the export cable answers for its damage within the limits of the 1976 Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims, because the vessel’s hull underwriter and the owner’s P&I club do not cover the same losses as the project’s construction all-risks policy, and because a charterer’s unpaid debt is first secured by arresting the vessel in the port where she calls, before any argument on the merits.

Two French rules deserve to be known before signing. Article 37 of the 2016 Ordinance reserves maritime transport between French territory and installations in the exclusive economic zone, for their routine maintenance, to vessels registered in and flying the flag of a Member State of the European Union or the European Economic Area, save exceptional ministerial derogation; those voyages must also start or end in an EU or EEA port. A maintenance fleet under a third-country flag is therefore not a default option. And article 38 of Act no. 2026-403 of 26 May 2026 on simplifying economic life allows contracting authorities and contracting entities, by derogation from article L. 2113-10 of the Public Procurement Code, not to divide into lots works, supply or service contracts relating to an offshore renewable electricity project above a threshold set by decree, which may not be lower than ten million euros excluding tax; the same option applies to contracts for associated transmission-network works. RTE’s and the ports’ contracts for offshore infrastructure can therefore be awarded as global packages, which changes the position of subcontractors and of the supply chain’s smaller firms.

The firm drafts and negotiates these contracts, in French and in English, and handles the disputes they generate: delay claims, calls on bank guarantees, contested acceptance, interface disputes between packages. The governing-law clause and the dispute-resolution clause are negotiated at the same time as the price, never afterwards.

Operating at sea: safety, security and the status of installations

The Act of 10 March 2023 gave floating structures a status. Artificial islands, installations and floating structures operated in French maritime spaces are registered, may be granted French nationality and are then capable of being mortgaged under the Customs Code (2016 Ordinance, art. 40-2). They are designed, built, maintained and operated in accordance with rules on maritime safety, operational security and pollution prevention, compliance with which is attested by a certificate issued by an approved body (art. 40-3), on pain of formal notice, consignment of funds, works carried out by the authorities and suspension of operations (art. 40-5), and of one year’s imprisonment and a EUR 150,000 fine for an operator who disregards a suspension (art. 45). Decree no. 2025-1101 of 19 November 2025 adopted the implementing measures: definition of the floating structure as a craft durably connected to the seabed or a fixed point and not intended for navigation, initial certificate of conformity before commissioning, periodic surveys at least every ten years, approval of survey bodies, a formal-notice procedure with a response period of at least two weeks.

The same decree inserted into Decree no. 2013-611 of 10 July 2013 an article 18 bis, in force since 22 November 2025, which refers to an order of the ministers for energy and the sea the design, layout and operating rules intended to ensure the security of offshore renewable installations and their connection works, throughout French maritime spaces. For farms already awarded or in the course of award, an order must set, before 30 September 2026, the adaptation measures and a compliance period that may not exceed five years. Security, in the sense of protection against malicious acts, thus enters the technical specifications of existing farms, which will have a cost and raises the question of passing it through to the operation and maintenance contracts already in force.

Around the installations, the State’s representative at sea may establish a 500-metre safety zone which may not be entered without authorisation, except by vessels engaged in laying, inspecting or maintaining the installation, supplying it, or in distress (art. 29); the owner or operator is responsible for maritime signalling and for nautical information (arts. 31 and 32). Seafarers working on board may remain affiliated to the French seafarers’ social security scheme, the employer then assuming the obligations of a shipowner (art. 38). For the law, a floating wind turbine is a hybrid object: a registered structure that is financed like a ship, surveyed like an industrial installation and marked like a hazard to navigation.

Financing and insuring an offshore project

Project finance rests on flows the law makes predictable: the article L. 311-12 contract for revenue, the connection agreement for grid access, the statutory delay and damage compensation for grid risks, the zero domain fee during the contract term for costs. In return, lenders ask for security over what the law allows to be charged: the shares of the project company, receivables under the remuneration contract, project accounts and, for floating structures under French flag, a mortgage registered under the Customs Code. The financial guarantees of article 22 of the 2016 Ordinance and the decommissioning commitments sit on top of this structure and must be sized at the permit application stage, because they condition the grant of the title.

Insurance follows the life of the project: a construction all-risks policy during the build, with its own offshore exclusions and its waiting periods on cables; hull and liability cover for installation vessels, usually borne by the owner; an operational and business-interruption policy once the farm is commissioned. The point most poorly handled in practice is the boundary between the project’s policy and the vessel’s: does a cable damaged by a service vessel’s anchor fall to the farm’s insurer, the owner’s insurer or the P&I club? The answer depends on how the waiver-of-recourse clauses are drafted, and it is discovered far too often after the loss. The firm advises on the negotiation of these policies, on the notification and management of claims and on recourse actions between insurers.

Decommissioning and site restoration

On expiry of the permit or at the end of operations, the holder is responsible for dismantling the installations and restoring the site, the authorities being able to decide to keep certain elements that benefit ecosystems without hindering navigation (2016 Ordinance, art. 23); the same rule applies to cables (art. 28). If the owner or operator refuses or neglects to do so, the authorities may, after formal notice, carry out the works at its expense and strip it of its rights over the installations (art. 40), and failure to act is punished by a EUR 75,000 fine (art. 47, III). These obligations travel with the project: the buyer of an operating farm takes over the decommissioning liability, and the acquisition audit must quantify the guarantees already in place and those still to be provided.

Offshore energy disputes

Three kinds of litigation coexist and do not resemble each other. Administrative litigation over permits, concentrated before the Conseil d’État at first and last instance, pits the developer against associations, fishing committees or coastal municipalities; it is won on the quality of the file and on the court’s regularisation powers. Disputes over titles to occupy the continental shelf and the exclusive economic zone, and over their fees, also fall to the administrative courts (2016 Ordinance, art. 54, II). Contract litigation, between the producer, its suppliers, its shipowners and RTE, is decided according to the negotiated clauses: international arbitration for supply and installation contracts with foreign groups, commercial or civil courts for the rest, with the usual questions of governing law and enforcement of awards. Maritime litigation, finally, covering collisions with a turbine, cable damage, ship arrests and seafarers’ claims, follows the Transport Code and the international conventions.

The firm appears before the French courts and assists clients in arbitration, and brings to these matters what energy-law teams often lack: hands-on practice of ship arrest, of the shipowner’s limitation of liability and of the enforcement in France of foreign awards and judgments.

Who we act for

Developers and utilities bidding in tenders, manufacturers and equipment suppliers, marine contractors and cable-layers, owners of installation and service vessels, maintenance companies, investors and lenders, insurers and brokers, ports and local authorities hosting maintenance bases. The size of the matter matters less than its nature: an off-hire clause in a crew transfer vessel charter deserves the same attention as a connection agreement, because it is often the one that triggers the dispute.

Typical matters

A French shipowner time-chartered a jack-up vessel to a construction consortium for foundation installation in the Channel; the consortium invokes a spell of bad weather to suspend hire, the owner argues that the weather clause covers only the impossibility of operating and not the commercial decision to delay the works. The dispute turns on three words of the charter party and on the deck logs, and it is prepared before the writ is issued, by arresting the replacement vessel chartered by the consortium.

A project company that won a tender receives from RTE the second stage of its connection agreement and finds that the proposed liability cap does not cover the standby cost of its installation fleet if the offshore substation is late. The task is to negotiate how the statutory compensation of article L. 342-8 fits with the contractual cap, and to shift the residual risk onto the installation contract or the construction all-risks policy.

An infrastructure fund acquires a stake in a farm that has been operating for four years; the audit reveals that decommissioning guarantees were provided for the turbines but not for the inter-array cables, and that the security order expected before 30 September 2026 will impose unbudgeted adaptation works. The price and the warranty package are renegotiated on that basis.

Frequently asked questions

Which law applies to a wind farm located in the French exclusive economic zone?

French law, as if the installation stood on metropolitan territory: that is what article 19 of Ordinance no. 2016-1687 of 8 December 2016 provides, within the limits of the jurisdiction the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea grants the coastal State. Siting there requires the single permit of article 20 of the same Ordinance, which is included in the environmental permit.

Who pays for the grid connection of an offshore wind farm awarded by tender?

The transmission system operator, RTE, where the producer does not choose the location of the siting zone (Energy Code, art. L. 342-16). Changes requested by the winner remain at its expense, and its default makes it bear stranded costs under the specifications.

What happens if RTE delivers the connection late?

The specifications set the completion date for the connection; if it is late, RTE pays the producer compensation whose calculation and cap are fixed by decree after consulting the CRE (Energy Code, art. L. 342-8, II, and Decree no. 2022-315 of 3 March 2022). Damage to connection works that curtails production is also compensated (art. L. 342-10). The model agreement approved by the CRE on 10 September 2026 for the AO10 projects adds an evolving contractual liability cap to this statutory regime.

What is the envelope permit?

The option, opened by article L. 181-28-1 of the Environmental Code, of obtaining the permits for an offshore project on the basis of variable characteristics (number, capacity and height of turbines, foundation type) within which the project may evolve after the titles are granted. The applicant then informs the authorities of the characteristics finally chosen.

Which court hears challenges to the permits of an offshore wind farm?

The Conseil d’État, at first and last instance, for all decisions relating to offshore renewable installations, their connection works up to the first onshore substation and the necessary port infrastructure (Code of Administrative Justice, art. R. 311-1-1, in force since 1 January 2024).

Is a floating wind turbine a ship?

No, but it borrows the ship’s regime on several points. Since Act no. 2023-175 of 10 March 2023, floating installations and structures are registered, may be granted French nationality and mortgaged, and must be certified by an approved body under maritime safety and operational security rules (2016 Ordinance, arts. 40-2 and 40-3; Decree no. 2025-1101 of 19 November 2025).

Can a farm be maintained by foreign-flagged vessels?

Not freely. Maritime transport between French territory and installations in the exclusive economic zone, for their routine maintenance, is reserved to vessels registered in and flying the flag of an EU or EEA Member State, save exceptional ministerial derogation (2016 Ordinance, art. 37).

Who must decommission the farm at the end of its life?

The permit holder, who is responsible for dismantling the installations and restoring the site, the authorities being able to keep elements that benefit ecosystems (2016 Ordinance, arts. 23 and 28). In case of default, the authorities carry out the works at the holder’s expense and may strip it of its rights (art. 40); failure to act is punished by a EUR 75,000 fine (art. 47, III).

Matters in this field are handled by Hervé Guyader, avocat at the Paris Bar and doctor of law. Page updated on 20 September 2026; the texts cited are those in force on that date.