Green Daily

It's a pretty well-known fact that France is a world leader when it comes to nuclear energy, but what you probably haven't heard is that France actually built the world's first tidal power plant in 1966. Ironically, the "barrage" style La Rance plant has been criticized for year for damaging the environment -- still, they had the right idea.

Just this week, France's state-run power company Electricite de France announced plans for France to update is wave-harnessing capacity. Just off the coast of Brittany -- that's in France's northwest, if you were wondering -- EDF officials have begun a project to install 3-6 new underwater turbines by 2011 -- hopefully kicking off France's expansion into wave power.

Contrary to what you might assume, hydro-electric dams like the one used in France's first La Rance power plant, are generally damaging to the surrounding ecosystem. Instead of going with a dam concept, the new project will consist of free-floating turbines, anchored to the sea floor -- similar to what PG&E is doing in California.

EDF has yet to select a contractor to build the $42M tidal project, but they have said that they expect it to generate somewhere between 4-6MW. Compare that to La Rance's 240MW and you can see that the new project is designed as a pilot program. According to the EDF's Caroline Muller, "We are going to make some studies to check whether this kind of electricity production is viable, and reliable."

[via Earth2Tech]