TotalEnergies has won a €4.5-billion ($5.30 billion) contract from the French Government to develop and build a 1.5 gigawatt wind farm off the Normandy coast in a consortium with RWE, it said on Wednesday.
The French energy major expects to make a final investment decision in early 2029, with power production to begin in 2033, according to a statement.
Total said the project represents an investment of €4.5 billion, with the tariff set by the state to be €66 per megawatt-hour.
The wind farm would produce six terawatt-hours of electricity annually, supplying the equivalent of one million households, the French Government said separately.
The contract - for what would be France's largest offshore wind farm to date - allows TotalEnergies to expand its renewables holdings in its home country, which it has previously criticised as unattractive compared to the UK and Germany due to its sluggish administrative procedures.
The concession announcement is a surprise on the part of France's outgoing government, which collapsed earlier this month over disagreements on budget cuts. That left the energy sector in limbo as a long-awaited energy planning law failed to pass before the collapse.
(Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro in Gdansk and America Hernandez in Paris; Editing by Joe Bavier and Bernadette Baum)