Bottlenecks Challenge European Wind Ambitions

By Simon West

Sif Group’s decision to press ahead with the construction of the world’s largest monopile foundation manufacturing plant in the Netherlands will have been cheered by Europe’s wind energy sector, which faces a growing litany of supply chain challenges that threaten to derail onshore and offshore development.

The Dutch offshore foundation maker announced in February it had taken a final investment decision on the €328 million plant — an expansion of its existing Maasvlakte II complex at the Port of Rotterdam. Work on the project was scheduled to start in April, with first production in the second half of 2024. The facility will have capacity to produce some 200 monopile foundations per year, increasing the current industry’s production by 80 percent.

“Sif is one of the few companies that support the market with those foundations, so they are crucial for the development of offshore wind,” said Danny Levenswaard, director of breakbulk at the Port of Rotterdam Authority. “Sif fits in perfectly with Rotterdam’s ambition to build up the sustainable side of business. It brings a lot of heavy-lift and project cargo to the port as well.”

According to Sif, monopiles are the most commonly used type of foundation for offshore wind turbines as they offer the best value for money. The foundations made by Sif measure up to 105 meters in length, 11 meters in diameter and weigh about 1,800 tonnes, and can be used in water depths of up to 60 meters.

But Guy Willems, strategic communications advisor at WindEurope, an industry group representing about 500 mostly European companies including OEMs, developers, electricity firms and component manufacturers, said the Maasvlakte II plant alone would be insufficient to meet soaring demand from offshore wind developers in Europe.

“Right now, the whole European industry has a capacity to produce 250 to 300 units per year, and major bottlenecks are starting to form because of that. Europe’s offshore foundation manufacturers are basically fully booked for the next three years,” Willems said. “So, you can imagine this new plant provides quite a significant increase in production. But by 2030 we will need 1,200 bottom-fixed foundations annually and 600 to 700 floating ones. The European industry will need much more expansion in the coming years.”

Monopiles are not the only component under threat of bottlenecks in Europe – other production facilities also need to scale up to meet the EU and its member states’ green energy 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.


Permit Bottleneck

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.


Growth in Equipment Scale

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.


Kickstarting Vessel Supply

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. 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.


Salute to Standardization

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.”


Breakbulk Europe 2023 will be hosting a "Managing the Offshore Wind Boom" main stage session on Wednesday 7 June. Click here for this year's full programme.

MAIN PHOTO: Sif Maasvlakte II monopile plant. CREDIT: Sif Netherlands b.v.