Conference & trade fair: WindEurope Annual Event 2025 – Scale up, Electrify, Deliver

– Putting wind at the heart of Europe’s competitiveness

I am looking forward to the WindEurope annual conference in Copenhagen again from April 8 to 10, 2025. I am particularly interested in the updates for the offshore wind industry. With the European Union’s Clean Industrial Deal and the trend towards qualitative tendering criteria, which will hopefully soon find their way into the Offshore Wind Act, there are plenty of glimmers of hope for a level playing field and thus for the competitiveness of the offshore wind supply industry in Europe. However, with increasing competition from China and, for example, the political developments for offshore wind in the United States, there are also growing challenges for the offshore wind industry.

The cost-cutting debate that has prevailed in recent years, in fact since the beginning of offshore wind development, has meant that hardly any reserves have been built up for the steeply rising expansion curve in the EU. Issues such as a shortage of skilled workers, also due to a lack of training initiatives, grid expansion, wake effects, a lack of port areas and marine spatial development planning, as well as the need for green steel, dominate the debates and sometimes make the achievement of targets seem a long way off. The lack of a supplier industry, in which billions of euros have been invested in recent years, is cited as a reason for investment security – closer cooperation between customers and contractors seems to make a lot of sense here.

The carbon footprint, which is both a resilience and sustainability criterion, and other criteria can make a significant contribution to building a stronger European offshore wind industry, which we need if we want to achieve the European expansion targets. For low flexibility costs and as a grid-stabilizing measure, the composition of the generation profiles of the various renewable energies is also crucial.

I look forward to seeing many familiar and new offshore wind faces at the WindEurope Annual Event 2025 in Copenhagen!