Back in 2002, when Ralf Grass founded EnergieTeam, wind power was still a tough sell in France, met with caution, if not outright suspicion. Twenty years on, the company has grown into a national-scale developer spanning wind, solar and storage, with a footprint reaching as much as 2% of the country’s annual electricity output. This is the story of that shift, and of a broader change in how France sees renewables.
Winning trust, one project at a time
Back then, there was no playbook. Wind turbines were an unknown quantity, and every rollout meant overcoming local wariness from scratch. “It took an enormous amount of groundwork,” Ralf Grass recalls: explaining how the technology worked, addressing concerns head-on, and proving the benefits, one project, one community at a time.
That groundwork paid off. Today, the energy transition isn’t some distant ambition, it’s woven into the landscape, into local budgets, and into the daily lives of the farmers hosting these installations on their land.
Buy-in isn’t optional
For EnergieTeam, there’s one non-negotiable behind every successful project: getting everyone on board – landowners, operators, elected officials, town councils, local residents.
That means talking, not just informing: consultation meetings, visits to operating wind farms so people can see for themselves what day-to-day life alongside turbines actually looks like, and direct conversations to surface concerns early. From there, the project has to bend to what it hears, in siting, scale, and commitments. The pattern is clear: projects that divide communities are usually projects imposed on them; projects that bring people together are built with them.
Repowering: experience is the best argument
For communities already living alongside a wind farm, repowering – swapping ageing turbines for higher-performing ones – comes with a built-in advantage: people already know what it’s really like, visually, acoustically, economically. That familiarity opens the door to dialogue, and often builds real local ownership. As Ralf Grass puts it, “younger generations who’ve grown up with these turbines on the horizon sometimes feel a genuine attachment to keeping them there.“
That head start doesn’t mean skipping the groundwork, though. Communities still need a clear case for why the upgrade matters: what it delivers over the next 25 years in installed capacity, tax revenue, and a better fit with the landscape. Done right, repowering is also a chance to fix what didn’t quite work the first time around and, in Grass’s words, “offer something better suited to the territory as it stands today.”
It’s a sovereignty story
You can’t talk about the energy transition without talking about sovereignty. A territory that gets its transition right is one that generates a meaningful share of the energy it consumes, keeps that production rooted locally, among farmers, local authorities, businesses, and helps build a Europe less exposed to external shocks. As Grass sums it up: “Wind power in France isn’t a utopia: it’s part of the answer, provided we choose, together, to make it happen.”