Wind Power, Onshore and Offshore

Wind is the second-largest source of renewable electricity after hydro and, onshore, one of the cheapest sources of new energy in windy regions. The world added a record ~117 GW of wind in 2024, ~8 GW of it offshore (GWEC, Global Wind Report 2025; verify), most of it in China. Yet the Western wind industry spent 2022–26 in crisis on two fronts. Turbine makers sold machines at fixed prices just before steel, logistics and interest costs jumped, rushed new, larger platforms to market, and paid for it in losses and quality failures: Vestas lost ~€1.6bn in 2022, and Siemens Gamesa's onshore defects led Siemens Energy to a profit warning in June 2023 and a German state-backed guarantee package in November 2023. Offshore developers had bid record-low prices on the assumption of cheap capital; when interest rates and supply-chain costs rose, contracts signed in 2019–21 became loss-making, and Ørsted cancelled its Ocean Wind 1 and 2 projects in New Jersey on 31 October 2023 with ~DKK 28bn of impairments, part of a wave of cancelled US and UK contracts. In the United States a third shock followed: from January 2025 the federal government paused new leasing, revoked or reviewed permits and issued stop-work orders on projects under construction (Empire Wind in April 2025, Revolution Wind in August 2025, and five projects in December 2025), all of which developers fought in court, winning preliminary injunctions by February 2026; the 2025 tax law also cut wind's federal credits short. Meanwhile the UK's January 2026 auction awarded a record ~8.4 GW of offshore contracts at ~£91/MWh (2024 prices), well above earlier rounds, a reset to prices that cover today's costs. This section explains how wind farms make money, turbine OEM economics, the offshore cost-of-capital shock, auction design, US federal actions, ports, vessels and grid connections, and how to read wind numbers.