2023-08-15 14:15:52
Along the road that connects Capbreton to Seignosse, in the Landes, it is impossible to miss them. Since the beginning of the summer, over ten kilometers, dozens of banners “No to the 400,000 volt very high voltage line” were affixed to the facades of houses and businesses, slipped into the back of cars, or hung on the trunks of pines.
At the origin of this mobilization, the fears aroused by a project consisting in burying a very high voltage electric line between Bordeaux and Bilbao, in Spain, over 400 kilometers, to promote energy exchanges between France and Spain . The last authorizations should arrive soon for a start of work scheduled for early October.
With a power of 2,000 megawatts and a voltage of 400,000 volts, the connection, at a cost of 3 billion euros, carried by the French operator Réseau de transport d’electricité (RTE) and the Spanish Red Eléctrica de España (REE), must pass under the sea for 270 kilometers, and underground for the remaining 130 kilometers, crossing the Gironde, the Landes and the Pyrénées-Atlantiques.
In the Landes, the line will circulate one meter twenty under the ground, except under the two beaches of the region where it will be buried ten meters deep. These electric cables will even navigate under a cycle path and must pass less than a hundred meters from a hundred dwellings and ten to fifteen meters from several dozen of them.
Exposed to magnetic waves
A closeness at the origin of all concerns. In Capbreton, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, Emmanuelle Gourlet was the first resident unfurling banners in front of his home. “The current route provides that the line will pass through the woods located a few dozen meters from my home, where I usually go walking with my children. We are going to be exposed daily to magnetic waves on which we have no perspective.she laments.
As soon as the project was announced in January 2021, a collective called “Stop THT 40” was formed, bringing together several thousand residents, like Emmanuelle, who are now campaigning for an alternative route. “We are not opposed to the project, whose interest we understand, but we are proposing another route, further away from urban areas. It’s a project of unprecedented scale, we don’t want to be used as guinea pigs.”explains Bernard, a retired electrical engineer, also a member of the collective, who does not wish to give his surname. “I am absolutely once morest the crossing of the line under the Bénesse-Maremne-Capbreton cycle path”says the mayor of Capbreton Patrick Laclédère, who is not opposed to the project either, but wants another route, further away from homes.
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