Editorial February

The Offshore Wind Summit showed that the North Sea countries agree that the North Sea has one of the largest domestic energy potentials in Europe and that it is important to systematically develop this potential together in the coming decades. To this end, more flexible grid connections will allow electricity to be transported to several countries in the future, the expansion in the North Sea region will be perpetuated to around 15 GW per year and auctions will be converted to the “Contract for Differences” – “CfD” model as a matter of priority. In return, the offshore wind industry has offered investments of ten billion euros in domestic production facilities and the creation of around 91,000 new jobs – as well as a significant reduction in the cost of electricity production.

So far so good and an encouraging conference! The priority now is to translate these shared high ambitions into national implementation while aligning the regulatory frameworks across all participating countries. This comes at a critical juncture: the German government’s last offshore wind auction of 2025 failed to attract a single bid, and with the 2026 auction remaining largely unchanged, prospects for participation remain dim. The current auction model is no longer viable for investors facing shifted cost structures with rising raw material prices and increased electricity market volatility, since without guaranteed feed-in tariffs, investors are forced to market the electricity directly to (industrial) customers. For some time now, the industry has therefore been calling for a rethink by the German government and a switch to the “Contract for Differences” model, with which Great Britain has long and again recently been very successful in triggering investments.

Our appeal to the German government with other organisations on 27 January in Berlin was therefore: suspend the 2026 round of auctions for offshore wind farms and launch a new auction mechanism using CfD immediately afterwards in 2026! The fact that the German government did so in a cabinet meeting on 28 January is in any case also a positive sign to the industry that the agreements reached at the Hamburg Offshore Summit in Germany have led to a better understanding of the situation and to a welcome rethink on the part of the German government. Now, a new auction structure should be decided quickly in 2026 and new wind farm areas should be put out to tender before the end of this year!