French court orders windfarm to cease operations for a year because the turbines caused the death of a golden eagle
Earlier this month, a French court ruled in favour of protecting eagles over “green,” “renewable” ideology.
A wind farm operator was slapped with a fine of €200,000 for causing the death of a golden eagle. The court also ordered the wind farm to stop operating for a year and fined the company’s director €40,000.
Hopefully, this is just the start of accountability for the destruction wind turbines cause to nature.
The Blade Stops Here: France Holds Wind Industry Accountable at Last
By Charles Rotter as published by Watts Up With That
The recent shutdown of the Bernagues wind farm in Hérault, France, marks a long-overdue reckoning with the lethal impacts of wind energy on wildlife – particularly raptors like the golden eagle.
On 9 April 2025, a French court ordered the entire site to cease operations for one year following the confirmed death of a golden eagle, a protected species, that collided with one of the farm’s turbine blades in January 2023. The decision also slapped Energie Renouvelable du Languedoc (“ERL”), the farm’s operator, with a €200,000 fine, half of which was suspended, and imposed an additional €40,000 fine on the company’s director.
This isn’t just a one-off judicial reaction. It represents a seismic shift in how the French legal system – and perhaps the broader public – are beginning to confront the uncomfortable truth about wind energy’s collateral damage. Despite the Green orthodoxy that surrounds renewables, wind turbines kill birds. And not just any birds. In this case, the victim was the breeding male of a golden eagle pair that had nested just three kilometres from the turbine site, a distance well beyond typical disturbance buffers used in wildlife protection.
Environmental groups hailed the court’s decision as a victory, but the implications go much deeper. For years, bird deaths caused by wind turbines have been ignored, downplayed or dismissed as unfortunate but tolerable trade-offs in the race toward “net zero.” But the Bernagues case shatters that illusion. Here, a single incident carried enough legal weight to halt energy production for a year – an implicit admission that the risks to protected species may outweigh the supposed benefits of wind energy.
And this isn’t happening in isolation. Another French wind farm in Aumelas was also ordered to suspend operations just two days earlier, along with a €5 million fine against EDF Renewables. Add to this the December 2023 ruling from the Nîmes Court of Appeal ordering the demolition of the Bernagues wind farm for lacking a valid building permit, and a pattern begins to emerge: the renewable energy sector, long shielded from scrutiny, is now being subjected to long-overdue consequences.
What’s changing? In part, a growing recognition – backed by research – that wind farms are not as benign as their public relations teams suggest. Two recent studies underline the broader threat to golden eagles. One, in Ecological Applications, shows that annual mortality already exceeds the threshold that eagle populations can sustain. Another, in Biological Conservation, tracks a rise in turbine-related eagle deaths in the western US, from 110 in 2013 to 270 in 2024. These are not rounding errors. They are statistical red flags.
And yet, the political and ideological machinery behind wind power continues to roll forward, impervious to facts. The push for “green” energy is not driven by data but by dogma. It’s a crusade rooted in carbon hysteria and the romanticisation of renewable energy, regardless of ecological consequences or economic efficiency. Wind power has become the cathedral of the climate faithful and turbines their spires – never mind the feathered corpses accumulating at their base.
This is not rational policymaking; it’s ideological fixation dressed up as science. If the goal were genuinely to balance human needs with environmental stewardship, the conversation would look very different. We’d be assessing energy sources on their real-world merits – reliability, cost, land use, ecological impact – not blindly throwing subsidies at whichever technology aligns with green slogans.
France’s court system has done what most governments have failed to do: impose real accountability on an industry that’s been operating with impunity. The Bernagues decision should serve as a precedent, not an anomaly. It’s a milestone in holding the wind industry to the same environmental standards it pretends to uphold. And it invites a critical question: if even the eagle – the emblem of nature’s majesty – isn’t safe from the blades of climate dogma, what exactly are we saving?
