Although the EWEA has extremely lofty targets for the installation for offshore wind in Europe to 2020, industry representatives did largely acknowledge there are monumental supply chain issues, as well as trans-continental transmission bottlenecks, that propose large roadblocks to achieving those goals. The UK clearly made it known that they intend to be the driving international growth of installed capacity with the Crown Estate Round 2 and 3 bid selections. A new trend is for large scale utilities (E.ON, Dong, Statkraft, StatoilHydro…) to partner up on these projects to win over larger and more prosperous geographic areas of offshore opportunity.

The conference was a great representation of both the opportunities, and challenges, of the blooming offshore wind energy. Industry players are excited about the political landscape and support regarding offshore, but the financial, transmission, and supply chain challenges continue to pose risks to achieve desired industry growth. Project finance is less available as many players left the market and the financing trend is to go balance sheet. With the expectation of surmounting the growing challenges and driving down cost per installed MW, major European utilities are jumping in to establish market position and capture their piece of the exponential growth.

Bring money and lots of natural gas backup plants.
As to jobs, see the report from King Carlos University about the jobs fiasco.

Rolf -- that jobs study from King Carlos University has been widely discredited as a bogus study, using poor assumptions and a flawed methodology: http://www.awea.org/newsroom/pdf/Spanish_Jobs_Study_Fact_Sheet.pdf

Jeff Anthony
American Wind Energy Association