The last year has highlighted both the vast potential of the growing offshore wind sector, and the major headwinds it must contend with.
On one hand, the United Kingdom, a major offshore wind market, produced nearly 20 per cent of the electricity it generated from offshore wind alone in 2025. Some 3,000 turbines generated enough electricity to power around 15.5 million homes.
In 2025, 9.3 GW of offshore wind capacity was connected to the grid. By the end of 2026, it’s estimated that a further 18.8 GW will be added across the world. That would take total global capacity above 100 GW.
In contrast to this positive backdrop are signs the industry is in a difficult period. 2025’s installations were dominated by China, at 6.6 GW, with European countries only adding around 3 GW. That’s off pace to meet many countries’ national targets, which must be fulfilled to meet climate goals. The Global Wind Energy Council, a trade industry association based in Portugal, also noted that just 11.4 GW of new projects were awarded contracts in 2025, down from 56 GW in 2024. That follows a series of failed auctions.
Some developers also cancelled large-scale projects. Notably, in May 2025 Danish developer Ørsted axed its UK-based Hornsea 4 project, which would have become one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world. Explaining its decision to end the 2.4 GW project, the company cited “an increase of supply chain costs, higher interest rates, and an increase in the risk to construct and operate” as reasons for the decision.
Other operators have pointed to similar issues, such as Japanese multinational Mitsubishi, which ended three projects totalling 1.5 MW in Japan in 2025. More recently, in May 2026, French energy giant TotalEnergies became the latest company to back out of offshore wind plans, cancelling a number of projects in Germany, while citing rising construction costs and grid connection delays. Two major projects totalled 3 GW. The German government is challenging this decision.
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We’re seeing a lot of ambition and growth, actually being underpinned by policy frameworks and auctions that are moving forwards in these newer regions. We need to see enough positive moves and a pipeline of auctions from governments so that there’s robust signals to the supply chain to really invest in the long run.
Amisha Patel, executive director, Global Offshore Wind Alliance
Experts point to supply chain crunches, operational backlogs and inflation that elevated project costs after years of steady declines as major factors for this tough period for offshore wind.
“There’s a global market that’s affected by global challenges,” Louise Efthimiou, floating offshore wind manager at the World Forum Offshore Wind, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Germany and Japan, told Mongabay in an interview. “But it’s still anticipated to move forward.”
Beyond these global challenges, there are a host of national-level concerns.
The US offshore wind sector faces its own unique roadblocks in the form of multipronged attempts by US President Donald Trump’s administration to derail the handful of planned projects and stymie new ones. Although the courts have blocked some of these attempts, the administration has thus far spent US$2.6 billion buying back leases for offshore wind projects to ensure they don’t proceed, a controversial move that’s resulted in widespread criticism.
But even countries with wind-friendly governments are experiencing challenges. A report by WindEurope, an advocacy group based in Belgium, for example, highlighted multiple issues holding back developments in European countries, such as bottlenecks in connecting wind farms to the grid, delays in permitting, and “slower-than-expected growth in electricity demand.”
“We know this technology works,” Athanasios Kolios, a professor in the department of wind and energy systems at Denmark Technical University, told Mongabay in an interview. “The real challenge is to deliver offshore wind at industrial scale at acceptable cost and with reliable performance.”
Growth in the sector
Compared to a decade ago, the offshore wind industry has changed dramatically and not only in terms of capacity. Average sizes of installed wind turbines have increased steadily. Two years ago, 11 MW turbines were common, but now, new installations are hitting sizes of 14-15 MW and above.
This uptick in size is certainly a boon for energy generation capacity and for keeping costs down, Sander Baksjøberget, an offshore wind senior analyst at Rystad Energy, an independent energy research group based in Norway, told Mongabay in an interview. “You need fewer foundations, fewer cables, fewer lifts, and you can also build bigger wind projects,” he added. “So, that is a major positive.”
Turbines could get even bigger, driven largely by innovation in China. Earlier this year, a 20 MW turbine was installed at China’s Three Gorges wind farm. Multiple Chinese companies are developing 25 MW turbines. And China’s Mingyang Smart Energy recently unveiled a 50 MW configuration that combines two 25 MW turbines on a single floating platform.
But this race to bigger, more powerful turbines also creates its own challenges, potentially hiking up component costs and necessitating larger vessels for installation and maintenance. Such challenges are already occurring with the shift to 15 MW turbines, Baksjøberget said.
Industry bodies such as WindEurope warned of upcoming gaps in the availability of foundation-laying vessels and turbine installers running through 2030, and the International Marine Contractors Association, a UK-based trade association, likewise called for increased investment in ships and ports to cater to growing offshore wind demands. According to one analysis, more than 100,000 kilometres (62,100 miles) of subsea cables will be laid between 2026 and 2040, with separate research underlining that this will require more specialised vessels.
“We are scaling very quickly, but manufacturing capacity, vessel availability and the port infrastructure are not always following at the same pace,” Kolios said.
In his view, the industry must shift toward standardisation. Not only do wind farms vary in size, but many are still developed on a project-by-project basis using bespoke designs, he said.
“If we want to meet these deployment targets, the sector needs to move towards serial production, modular fabrication, standardised interfaces, repeatable installation methods and stronger port infrastructure,” Kolios said. That model is already pursued in China, which dominates global offshore wind capacity by a large margin.
Efthimiou added that though continued innovation is important and increasing turbine sizes is positive, scaling offshore wind will require a period of technological certainty.
“From a pure planning and supply chain perspective, it’s best to cap [turbine size] at some point, because the supply chain needs to respond to a fixed set of technology,” she said. “The race to continue growing the turbine model size doesn’t make much sense when we’re trying to build out as fast as possible.”
Room for innovation
The vast majority of offshore wind installed today utilises fixed foundations in shallower, coastal waters. Floating wind technologies — turbines affixed to floating platforms that are anchored to the seabed — will be key to meeting climate targets, according to reports, as they can unlock expansion into deeper waters in places where suitable shallow coastal waters are scarce, such as in the Mediterranean Sea and off the coasts of Japan and South Korea.
Today, floating wind capacity is minimal, with less than 300 MW installed — less than 1 per cent of the 83 GW of offshore wind capacity that’s currently installed. Norway’s Hywind Tampen wind farm, designed to power oil and gas facilities in the North Sea, produces around 95 MW of energy and is the world’s largest floating farm. Previous goals, such as Europe fitting out 10 GW of floating wind by 2030, have fallen through and expectations have sobered.
According to Efthimiou, her organisation’s ambition is for one commercial-scale floating wind farm of around 250 MW or more to become operational by 2030. That’s certainly achievable, she said, and will help unlock rapid development. “More exponential growth is expected once that happens,” she said.
As with fixed-platform turbines, a major challenge facing floating wind developers is rising costs. Another is the field’s immature development status, with an array of different platforms and technologies currently available. Floating wind installations will also require the development of specific port facilities and ships to build and deploy them.
Waste is another huge and growing issue for the wind sector, both onshore and offshore, with thousands of tons of blades made of complex materials reaching the end of their life each year and largely being landfilled. Some companies are investing in recyclable blades. Vattenfall, a Dutch company, has developed a method to turn used blades into construction materials.
“There is progress in that sense, but then we’re only talking about very small parts of the industry,” Anne Velenturf, circular economy researcher at the University of Leeds in England, told Mongabay. She said the industry should focus on extending the life of turbines and developing technologies that don’t require substantial amounts of critical minerals.
“I would say that circular economy principles are essential for scaling offshore wind sustainably, if offshore wind is to move from tens of gigawatts to hundreds of gigawatts,” Kolios said.
Another innovation under investigation is hooking wind turbines up to battery storage. That could help tackle a common criticism of wind and other renewables: Their intermittence. Wind, in particular, is at risk due to curtailments — periods when turbines are shut down to prevent system overloads — and wind droughts that could increase in some locations due to climate change.
Policy and regulatory landscape
Multiple experts Mongabay spoke to underlined that policy and regulations are key to navigating offshore wind through the larger challenges facing the sector.
“To get decreasing costs for offshore wind, I believe the market needs a stable demand for all the players in the supply chain,” Baksjøberget said. “That starts with policy from the governments.”
Experts said “contracts for difference” (CfDs) are considered the gold standard within the sector for leasing and energy agreements between developers and governments. Under such schemes, developers and governments agree on a “strike price” for energy produced by a project, below which governments cover costs and above which the company returns the surplus. Essentially, CfDs offer protection against volatility in the energy market.
A series of failed and delayed auctions in recent years, in countries such as the UK, Germany, Belgium, Japan and India, underlined the need for careful auction design, Efthimiou said. Denmark recently revamped its CfD auction after a failure in 2024 and garnered renewed interest in two sites slated for wind development.
Some experts noted a need for improvements to grid planning to cut lengthy delays and smoothen the permitting process. They recommended governments establish one-stop shops for developers to efficiently proceed through environmental impact assessments and other permits. The Netherlands uses such a system, and it has proven effective, they said.
“I don’t think that going faster is the solution,” Shamini Selvaratnam, a director of international climate and clean energy at the Ocean Conservancy, a US-based nonprofit, told Mongabay, noting that key components of permitting, such as environmental impact assessments and siting, must be conducted carefully. “I think that a coordinated approach would help streamline this process.”
Beyond already existing markets, Amisha Patel, executive director of the Global Offshore Wind Alliance, an international advocacy organisation, pointed to promising signs that numerous countries are putting strong policies in place, including the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Colombia, Brazil and Chile. The Philippines, for example, is running its first offshore wind auction with a total capacity of 3.3 GW.
“We’re seeing a lot of ambition and growth, actually being underpinned by policy frameworks and auctions that are moving forwards in these newer regions,” she told Mongabay. “We need to see enough positive moves and a pipeline of auctions from governments so that there’s robust signals to the supply chain to really invest in the long run.”
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
