Author: Aggie Georgiopoulou
The combined AO9/AO10 French offshore wind tender is now open, and it’s on a different scale to anything the country has run before. A total of seven sites are included (eleven individual project lots once Fécamp Grand Large and Golfe du Lion Centre’s lots are counted separately), with a mix of fixed-bottom and floating foundations, across Normandy, Brittany, the South Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean. The deadline for the submission of tenders is set for October 12th, 2026.
This is a significant opportunity for offshore wind in France, and the decisions ahead carry real consequences for whoever bids. Given the scale of the tender, we don’t expect developers to bid on all the sites. Most will pick one, maybe more, and spend September and early October building the technical and financial case for those choices. It starts with a question that’s easy to underestimate: what’s actually under the water at each site?
Site selection decisions
The French Government has released some data, but it only goes so far. Every one of the seven sites differs in its ground conditions, water depth and topography, sediment mobility and scour potential, bedrock outcrops and boulders, and all of it needs to be understood before a serious bid can be built.
Those conditions shape almost everything that follows: foundation design, installation approach, cost estimates, and the risk profile a developer is willing to put their name to. We’ve put the time in to build a usable analysis that lets developers compare sites against their own risk profile.
Pre-bid expert analysis
The team at Ternan Energy has spent time ahead of the tender deadline building an independent pre-bid analysis covering all seven AO9/AO10 sites, looking at the same inputs that matter most at this early stage, the ones that usually populate geo-risk registers. The result is a site-by-site picture that allows a direct comparison of ground conditions, showing where they’re more manageable and where they pose greater challenges.
This is by no means a substitute for a ground model. It’s a route to making informed early decisions, before committing the time and budget a full technical case demands.
AO9 / AO10 site constraints
This is a lightweight version of our full insights, which is available from the Ternan team
A different way to show risk
We made a conscious decision not to use a traffic light system of red, amber, green. That colour set has the potential to induce an unconscious pass-or-fail bias, which is exactly what we wanted to avoid.
The matrix uses a neutral scale to show the probability of different ground conditions at each location. This is not a stop/go, generic decision. Our goal is to offer up the information to weigh a site against their own strengths.
What’s in the full picture, available now
The summary above gives a first look at how the sites compare.
We have also prepared a more detailed analysis that goes further. We have documented the specifics behind each factor for every site individually, still ranked from low to high probability rather than reduced to a single score. What this gives the reader is the opportunity to see exactly where a site’s challenges and advantages lie.
If France’s AO9/AO10 tender is on your radar, I’d be happy to send you the full analysis directly. Get in touch, and I will send it straight to you.
Aggie Georgiopoulou, Geoscience Manager, Ternan Energy