Power from beneath the sea

Brittany is building a port for an industry that for now exists mostly on paper: turbines to harness tidal forces on the sea floor.

Brest is promising renewable energy developers a 30 per cent discount on leases as the French port city aims to attract investors in alternative energy. Marcel Mochet / AFP

BREST, France // Sailboats bob gently on the waves in this calm harbour in Brittany, sheltered from the Atlantic's rough waters by a lip of land.

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For centuries, Brest has exploited this location, blessed by a naturally protected port close to the high seas. Fishermen dock here. Tourists summer here. The navy's nuclear submarines are based here, and every year, crude oil, iron scrap and 180,000 tonnes of frozen chicken pass through.

Brest hopes to add a category to the port's list of activities - electricity production by underwater turbines, called hydroliennes by the French, driven by ocean currents.

The city aims in the next five years to complete a €150 million (Dh779.5m) extension to the port for factories, assembly sites and specialised barges that will cost US$500,000 (Dh1.8m) a day to rent. The only catch is that for now these improvements, as least as Brest imagines them, exist mostly on paper.

"It's as if you were a company entering aeronautics 20 years before the rest," says Jean-Jacques Lenormand, the deputy director of Brittany's ports. "It's an investment of the future."

An hydrolienne is like an underwater windmill - a turbine on the sea floor that harnesses the force of tidal currents to produce electricity. Marine turbines have been installed in the waters of Ireland, Canada and New York City, but so far their numbers and size have been small. Brittany plans to submerge the world's biggest array of hydroliennes by next year, with a maximum overall capacity of 8 megawatts, and the port extension is a bet that this form of renewable energy will become as popular as wind energy.

Mr Lenormand describes his port as locked in an idealistic struggle - not with the windmills but with other nations vying for hydrolienne supremacy.

"You have five countries who are fighting in this battle - US, Canada, the UK, Norway and France," says Mr Lenormand, who up until three weeks ago was a business developer at France's biggest hydrolienne maker, the naval contractor DCNS.

"The priority will go to the one who can first get the commercial aspects of the market … We have to build prototypes before arriving at a certain level of commercial rationality, to be ready to take parts of the market in 2020 or 2025."

The port is in talks with DCNS and three other producers of renewable-energy equipment - old-school wind turbines are also on Brest's wish list - to set up factories and research centres on the port extension.

Brest is promising renewable energy developers a 30 per cent discount on leases, although 13 of the 38 hectares of the extension are still available to more traditional industries.

It is also hawking the vessels that have been tailored to carry the heavy foundations for wind turbines and windmills, as well as the ready-made market of Brittany's planned offshore wind and underwater turbine farms.

The first of those installations began this month, when developers submerged an hydrolienne off the coast of northern Brittany. The span of its blades is 16 metres. Once all four turbines planned for installation are in place next year, the array should produce enough electricity for 4,000 homes, according to OpenHydro, the Irish company that designed the turbines.

State-owned DCNS has bought an 8 per cent stake in OpenHydro and makes the turbines, while the utility EDF Energies Nouvelles, also state-owned, will take the power into its grid.

The French investments are driven in part by a desire to add alternative energy sources in a nation that derives about 80 per cent of its power from nuclear plants, the highest ratio in the world.

The abundance of nuclear power, which is also relatively cheap, also makes it difficult for more expensive renewable technologies to compete, says Yann-Hervé De Roeck, a project manager at Ifremer - the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea.

Mr De Roeck's work includes applying for grants and other support from the government for the technologies Ifremer researches, including electricity production by forcing freshwater into saltwater, and wave turbines that work at the surface.

His work and that of an estimated 1,200 researchers in Brest, along with the planned port extension, are all part of Brittany's master plan to make renewable energy from the sea a mainstay of the economy. But Mr De Roeck acknowledges there could be opposition to overcome.

"There are people who own holiday homes who don't want to look for the green flash on the horizon and see a wind turbine," he says.