Europe faces offshore wind bottlenecks without new investment – analyst

In its latest report, ‘Western offshore wind supply chain: Scaling up or missing out?’, Aegir Insights finds that a lack of new investments in offshore wind manufacturing could open the door to overseas manufacturers such as the large Chinese wind turbine OEMs that are already eyeing expansion beyond their competitive domestic market. 

The report created forecasts using Aegir’s own data sets. It shows that even a base case scenario for expected offshore wind turbine demand will reach around 47GW in Europe by the end of the decade, and will likely be much higher than that by 2040. 

“The offshore wind sector is at a crossroads – scaling up production capacity in the near future is not just an opportunity, but an imperative to avoid missing out on the next wave of growth,” says Laura Fecova, senior associate at Aegir Insights and author of the report. 

The report underlined existing concerns over European manufacturing capacity for offshore wind compared with the vast output of rival offshore wind hubs such as China, which boasts the world’s largest offshore wind fleet and greater manufacturing capacity than any other country. 

Despite European concerns over “unfair” competition from Chinese wind power firms, Fecova points out that many offshore wind manufacturers in Europe already rely on Chinese manufacturing for some of their turbine components. 

“While the use of Chinese turbines is the current talk of the industry, Chinese monopiles are already used for construction of European projects,” she says, adding: “These constraints could open a window of opportunity for Chinese manufacturers to capture market share, provided they navigate regulatory and geopolitical hurdles.”