Independent:
The view from the Normandy landing beaches is to be transformed – critics say "desecrated" – by an immense offshore wind farm.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced this week that one of the most poignant sea and beachscapes in the world – the Calvados coast, between Juno and Omaha beaches – had been selected as the site for one of five vast wind farms to be built off the French Atlantic seaboard from 2015.
Officials insist the generators, two-thirds the height of the Eiffel Tower, will only just be visible from the coast. But the leader of an official commemorative association and a militant ecologists' group said yesterday that France was failing in its duty to preserve the memory of D-Day, and the "essential character" of the five landing beaches on which 2,500 allied soldiers died on 6 June 1944.
The choice of the site, 11 kilometres off Courseulles-sur-Mer (Juno Beach), was "inappropriate and incoherent", Admiral Christian Brac de la Perrière, the president of the Comité du Débarquement, the official French body for commemorating D-Day, said yesterday.
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I don't really have a problem with them putting the windmills there, but it would be more interesting if the things worked year round and did not freeze up when the weather freezes. Many of these units have not been efficient enough to be dependable without a backup power source. France relies mainly on nukes so it is not clear why they need the windmills.
Image via Wikipedia
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