Paris skyline to include wind turbines
"We are not talking of big models like those we see in the countryside. We are in Paris and we musn't disfigure the landscape," Denis Baupin, a deputy mayor in charge of sustainable development, told Le Parisien newspaper.
The turbines would be installed on flat rooftops in four neighborhoods, which experience strong winds, he said in the interview.
One of them is Montmartre in northern Paris home to the celebrated Sacre-Coeur Basilica and the Moulin Rouge cabaret, whose name translates as "Red Windmill."
Other capital cities such as London have already installed big wind turbines on their city fringes and a huge turbine is expected to be built for the 2012 Olympic games, the paper said.
The turbines in Paris will produce electricity that will be sold to the state-owned utility EDF or directly used in the buildings where they will be installed, Baupin said.
Baupin said the city's authorities were also studying setting up water turbines under the capital's bridges of the Seine River.
"The first tests will start in 2011 or 2012," he said.
France aims for terrestrial wind energy to reach 20,000 megawatts by 2020, or around 20 percent of current capacity, up from 3,000 MW now.
Related News

Court quashes government cancellation of wind farm near Cornwall
CORNWALL - Construction of a wind farm in eastern Ontario will move ahead after a court quashed a provincial government decision to cancel the project.
In a ruling released Wednesday, a panel of Ontario Superior Court judges said the province's decision to scrap the Nation Rise Wind Farm in December 2019 did not meet the proper requirements.
At the time, Environment Minister Jeff Yurek revoked the approvals of the project near Cornwall, Ont., citing the risk to three bat species.
That decision came despite a ruling from the province's Environmental Review Tribunal that determined the risk the project posed to the bat population…