Within a European project, MAREN, aiming to characterize the wave energy in the Atlantic coast of Europe, this paper presents a numerical study of the wave energy in the western French coast, in particular in its pilot zones. For this study two third generation state of the art models were used. A generation model, WAVEWATCH III was used to generate waves for the entire North Atlantic basin, and a transformation model, SWAN, was used to study the evolution of the waves in the specific area of the French coast. For both models the wind input fields used are from ERA Interim data base, produced by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecast (ECMWF), with time steps of 6 hours. Results are validated with two buoy data from French network CANDHIS, operated by CETMEF, comparing Significant Wave Height (Hs), Mean Period (Tm), and Peak Period (Tp) data. After this evaluation the paper focuses on the application of this data for estimate the wave energy resource in the French coast, calculating wave energy transport per unit and its theoretical values of wave power, in particular at the test site close to Le Croisic (Pays de la Loire).
