CHALLENGE EUROPEAN

ambitions. The conflict in Ukraine is creating further uncertainty for investors, who are grappling with high energy prices and disrupted markets for key raw materials. Last year, Europe invested €17 billion in new wind projects, down from €41 billion in 2021 and the lowest figure since 2009, said WindEurope.

For Willems, another particularly acute problem is permitting for new wind farms, especially onshore. On the national level, rules can be complex and burdensome, with lead-times taking up to 10 years.

“A lot of rules relate to how far wind farms have to be from houses, military zones or natural protection areas. Poland, for example, until recently had a rule called 10H whereby a turbine’s height determines how far it needs to be from a residential zone. This rule excludes 95 percent of the whole of Poland from any development. They have now lowered this limit to a 700-meter distance rule, which is still more restrictive than the European average.

“On top of that, procedures are just super slow. There are a lot of administrative authorities involved — you have national governments, regional governments, municipal and local governments. You sometimes have up to 30 or 40 authorities that are involved in issuing a single permit.”

WindEurope said the EU should be building more than 31 GW per year to meet its 2030 wind energy capacity targets. To achieve this, Europe must “continue to simplify permitting and invest heavily in its wind energy supply chain to deliver its energy and climate targets,” it said.

Another supply chain challenge is the ever-increasing size and weight of components. The offshore wind industry in particular is driven by constant technical innovation, with pieces such as monopiles and turbines getting bigger and more powerful by the year.

As these mammoth units get more complex, so does the equipment required to move them, resulting in capacity and affordability challenges for specialist transport companies.

“What you are seeing in offshore development is that the race for bigger turbines is moving so quickly that you really have to look at the type of equipment you are investing in,” said Pieter Jacobs, head of onshore wind at Mammoet. “Today it could be suitable for the market, but maybe in two or three years, it is too small. It is not feasible to use anymore, or at least for the capacity that is required.”

Specialized vessels to transport, install and service turbines are also feeling the pressure as offshore wind components increase in size and weight, with single turbines from European producers expected to reach 16-18 MW in the coming years, up from about 7 MW today. A looming shortage of such ships is likely to create another bottleneck unless serious money is spent on new assets.

To keep pace with the demand in Europe alone, an additional 56 vessels of all types will need to be built and brought online by the end of the decade, WindEurope said. If the sector invests now, the worst shortages expected to hit between 2028 and 2030 can be avoided, the industry group added.

Some exciting industry-led developments are already starting to emerge.

In April, Maersk Supply Service announced it had paired up with GustoMSC to begin design work on a next generation wind installation vessel tailored for the European market.

According to Jonas Munch Agerskov, vice president and CCO at MSS, the new concept has the potential to change the way wind farms are installed from both an offshore and onshore perspective.

The upgraded model, Agerskov said, would allow the jack-up vessel to stay on location at the offshore site, with tugs and barges deployed instead to sail to and from ports carrying the turbine towers, nacelles and blades. As projects move further ashore, efficiency gains would rise.

The new design, which could hit the European market as early as 2027, would be capable of completing a project 30 to 35 percent faster than conventional wind installation vessels, which have to transit back and forth from site to port to reload components.

“To an extent, Europe, while being the pioneers in offshore wind, have built their way into fixed infrastructure bottlenecks, with more or less only two ports in the region geared for the new 15 MW-plus projects, adding massive onshore logistical challenges with large layout areas and dead capital tied at key sites waiting to be installed,” Agerskov told Breakbulk

“Operating our concept requires a significantly smaller key site than Bremerhaven or Esbjerg — compare birthing a tug and barge versus a 170-meter-long wind installation vessel — and you do not need to prepare the seabed in port for jacking operations. Furthermore, we transit with one wind turbine at a time in a continuous flow, which means that you do not need to have the same level of wind turbine components in stock in port. All of the above has the potential to enable a range of smaller ports that otherwise would not qualify as load-out hubs.

“This can enable ports to be in closer proximity to both project sites and to where the actual supply chain of turbine components is being manufactured, and thereby solving the increasing onshore logistical challenges of moving components from assembly plant to port.”

Mammoet’s Jacobs, meanwhile, said the segmented nature of the supply chain remains a major challenge, with more communication needed to bridge the divide between heavy-lift transport capacity and the shipping demands of OEMs.

For Jacobs, standardizing transport solutions could be the solution to reducing the complexity and cost of moving turbines and other wind farm components. The Mammoet executive is one of several members of a work group set up at Breakbulk Europe 2022 to explore options for standardizing shipping equipment and interfaces and reducing the carbon footprint of transport.

The group, which reunited in Rotterdam this year, is facilitated by Thomas Sender Mehl, senior vice president of global supply chain at CakeBoxx Technologies, a company focused on supply chain systems engineering and end-to-end solutions for the transport and storage of cargo.

Jacobs said the initial focus was to look at ways to standardize the tower feed component used by manufacturers to ship the onshore and offshore tower parts of the turbine. “With the different parties involved we can start sharing information and making the first steps towards standardizing.”

Group member Antonio Lazaro Alonso, global operations planning director at LM Wind Power, a part of GE Renewable Energy, said the group was a “unique opportunity” for the industry.

“This is exactly what has made global logistics efficient. Imagine a world without standard containers — shipping goods would be much more expensive. We are looking at something similar — let’s get a standard way of shipping wind turbine components,” Alonso said.

“This will allow all the logistics value chain to innovate and plan around something that is fixed for everyone. Yes, this may bring some limitation in the design of components, but in return it will allow everyone else in the value chain to develop the needed equipment in parallel. On top of that, this could allow transport equipment interchangeability and hence a better asset utilization — something we should not be competing on.”