Offshore wind transmission in 2026: from big targets to defensible decisions

Offshore wind has never been short of ambition

Our CEO Mark-Paul Buckingham attended the Offshore Wind Transmission Europe Event in Amsterdam, and has shared his thoughts on where the industry is going.

The opening sessions in Amsterdam put that front and centre: the scale being talked about for 2050 is enormous. And the direction of travel is clear. What’s changed is that we’re now moving from planning to execution, which means we’re in the part of the journey where physics, infrastructure and decision-making discipline start to matter more than vision statements. 

Ambition is easy to print on a slide. 

Delivery has constraints. 

1) Transmission isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s the system. 

One analogy I heard (and like) is that the grid was designed like a human body. Historically, we built around one big carbon power station acting as the heart, pushing energy outward through arteries that taper down to capillaries at the edges. 

That architecture made sense when the heart sat in the centre. 

Now we’re connecting multi-gigawatt offshore wind farms at the fingertips of the system. If you bolted a human heart onto a fingertip, you wouldn’t get better circulation. You’d rupture the capillaries. 

Offshore wind doesn’t just add generation. 

It relocates the heart. 

And if we don’t redesign the arteries, the system can’t cope. 

That’s the real transmission conversation: not “can we connect it?” but “how do we redesign the circulatory system fast enough, and in a way that stays reliable?” 

2) Subsea cable risk is where decision-making discipline shows up. 

A lot of subsea cable work still starts in the wrong place. 

It starts with “What can we model?” or “What data have we got?” 

The better starting point is: what are we trying to decide? 

Route risk. Burial assumptions. Fatigue drivers. Inspection strategy. Lifetime extension. 

Or the awkward one that tends to sit behind all of the above: what uncertainty are we willing to carry into a bankable decision? 

Once you name the decision, the modelling becomes clearer, and usually simpler. Without that clarity, teams can produce impressive analysis that doesn’t reduce uncertainty where it matters. 

And when decisions are expensive, long-lived and visible to investors and regulators, uncertainty has a habit of compounding. 

This isn’t a technology limitation. It’s a decision architecture problem. 

3) Monitoring is getting easier. Accountability isn’t. 

The same pattern shows up in the monitoring conversation. 

Sensors, data pipelines and machine learning are all getting better. It’s becoming cheaper to measure more things, more often. 

But measurement isn’t the point. 

The hard part is agreeing what a signal is meant to trigger, and who owns the call when it does. 

Intervene. Inspect. Adjust operations. Accept risk. Wait. 

If a monitoring system doesn’t change what happens next, it becomes another layer of information people can debate. And “more information” is an easy way for organisations to delay irreversible decisions. 

Data can be a genuine asset. 

It can also become a permanent operating cost that never earns its keep. 

The difference is whether it drives decisions by default, or debate by committee. 

4) At this scale, delivery is a multi-organisation trust problem 

One thing that came through clearly in Amsterdam is that offshore wind transmission at this scale is not a single-organisation optimisation problem. 

It requires multiple organisations, serious planning, and trust to get projects underway, and to keep them moving when constraints bite. 

And because the delivery chain is long and interdependent, risk mitigation can’t be an afterthought. It has to run through everything: route strategy, assumptions, evidence, monitoring, and the decisions that follow. 

That’s where “true” digital twins matter. Not as a visual layer, but as a way of managing risk across the lifecycle, giving teams a defensible basis for decisions when the stakes are high. 

5) Where we are now 

If I had to summarise where the industry is right now, it’s this: 

• We know the scale we’re aiming for. 
• We can see the major constraints. 
• We have more capability than ever: modelling, measurement, AI. 
• The bottleneck is becoming decision-making: ownership, boundaries, and defensibility. 

That’s actually a good sign. It means the conversation is maturing. 

But it also means we can’t rely on “innovation” as a slogan. We need to be specific about what we trust, what we validate, and what we’re prepared to act on. 

6) Where we need to go next 

To move from ambition to delivery at scale, three things need to tighten: 

First: decisions need owners. 
Not “a steering group”. Not “alignment”. Someone who carries the outcome. 

Second: models need job descriptions. 
What decision do they exist to support? What uncertainty are they allowed to carry? What does “good enough” mean? 

Third: data needs to earn its keep. 
If it doesn’t change what happens next, it isn’t helping.  

None of this is glamorous. It’s the work. 

But it’s also the opportunity. The organisations that pull ahead won’t be the ones who talk loudest about targets or tooling. 

They’ll be the ones who turn capability into decisions people are willing to act on. 

That’s what makes offshore wind transmission the real story in 2026: it forces the industry to get serious about what “defensible” actually means: technically, commercially and operationally. 

And that’s a good thing. 

The uncomfortable truth is that the technology isn’t the limiting factor. 

The limiting factor is whether multiple organisations can align around decisions that are technically robust, commercially bankable, and owned. 

That takes planning, and it takes trust. 

And at this scale, mitigation to risk throughout isn’t optional — it’s the work. 

That’s why true digital twins are becoming critical: not because they’re fashionable, but because they give people a way to make high-stakes decisions they’re willing to stand behind. 

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