Offshore wind Mega Projects: No silver bullet, but a serious proposition

The Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult proposal for the UK to build 15GW Mega Projects is no silver bullet but it is a serious proposition for how we can build bigger, better and smarter – and puts on the table what many in the industry have quietly known for years.

The Mega Projects report released this month is an excellent and welcome contribution to the UK offshore wind policy debate, and it’s nice to be discussing innovation and not different shades of Private Frazer-style ‘we’re doomed’ in articles.

It also lands at a critical juncture: costs are rising, investment confidence is more shaky than it’s been in years, and the net zero consensus is fraying. Yet here is a proposal that dares to look beyond auction cycles and delivery gaps and instead puts forward a bolder industrial vision, a 15GW Mega Project model, coordinated across manufacturing, logistics and infrastructure.

Not one giant offshore wind farm, but a phased, multi-site build unified by a single strategy. Standardised, regionally anchored and backed by a tailored Contract for Difference (CfD), built not for market optimisation alone, but to unlock UK content, drive investment in supply chains, and rebuild confidence across the sector.

The economic logic is sound. The report models £10.3bn ($13.9bn) in total project cost savings versus five standalone 3GW projects, with DEVEX down 60%, CAPEX down 14%, and OPEX down 16%. It estimates £9.3bn more in net cash flow, £12bn in potential savings for consumers via lower CfD strike prices, and a meaningful increase in UK jobs and gross value added. In short: build bigger, build better, and build smarter.

But the real challenge is not in the cost models. It’s in the system.

Because to deliver a Mega Project of this scale, we would need to rethink how we plan, procure, and finance offshore wind in the UK. And it’s far from clear whether the political or institutional will exists to do that.

Start with the Treasury. The UK’s energy market framework is built on a longstanding orthodoxy of competitive neutrality, auction-based, technology-agnostic and hands-off. A position that has allowed the City of London to prosper, but not the UK’s industrial base. The CfD regime is a textbook product of that mindset. But Mega Projects would require a bespoke CfD award, negotiated outside the Allocation Round process. It would require government to act less like a referee and more like a strategic partner, something the Treasury is allergic to.

Then there’s financing. A 15GW programme might require 50–60 lenders, far exceeding the Dogger Bank model, which already stretched the boundaries of current financial syndication. The report acknowledges that risk concentration could raise the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC), and suggests new financial mechanisms, risk underwriting, or even government guarantees. All plausible. None straightforward.

And what of the regulators? The consenting, environmental, and planning burden for one 15GW project, even if geographically dispersed, would require coordination across Ofgem, the Marine Management Organisation, Crown Estate, local authorities and National Grid ESO. That would be a monumental administrative effort. One that our current framework is simply not built to handle.

Finally, the political challenge. Net zero, once a safe bipartisan space, is increasingly contested in an attempt to make it the next culture war battlefield. A UK general election looms within four years. Institutional reform of this scale, rewiring the CfD process, planning a national-scale offshore grid, reforming the supply chain support model, is unlikely to top the manifesto list of any party right now.

And yet, while there have been real steps forward, Labour’s Clean Power 2030 Plan, the creation of GB Energy, and growing recognition of structural barriers, the absence of a joined-up, long-term industrial ambition is precisely why we still face stalled projects, grid bottlenecks, and a supply chain struggling to scale.

So where does this leave us?

The Mega Projects report is not a silver bullet. But it is a serious proposition. It puts on the table what many in the industry have quietly known for years: that the current model, designed for cost reduction, is not designed for industrial growth and achieving ambitious accelerated targets. If we want all three, we need new tools – and new thinking.

The real question is whether the UK still has the institutional imagination to act at this scale. Can we move beyond incrementalism and engineer a system that actually matches our offshore ambitions?

Because if we can’t think big now – when offshore wind is central to our energy, economic and climate future – then when?