Germany began 2026 with its offshore wind programme stalling. An auction had failed in 2025, the rounds planned for 2026 were suspended, and there was open doubt over whether several already-awarded projects would be built at all. What has followed is less a single breakthrough than a sequence of corrections — at the North Sea Summit, inside the Federal Network Agency, in the Bundesrat, and along a supply chain that increasingly runs through the Baltic.
The diagnosis from the German Offshore Wind Energy Association (BWO) was blunt: the auction design itself had to change. Managing director Stefan Thimm pointed to the failed 2025 tender and the suspended 2026 rounds as proof that the current model was deterring investment, and argued that Germany needs an indexed, two-sided contracts-for-difference (CfD) model to improve financing conditions and raise the odds that awarded projects actually get built.
A pact in Hamburg
The clearest signal came from the North Sea Summit in Hamburg, where the governments of the North Sea coastal states, transmission operators and industry agreed an Offshore Wind Investment Pact. Under it, governments committed to tender 15 GW of offshore capacity every year between 2031 and 2040, with at least 10 GW annually secured through indexed, bilateral CfDs — the mechanism the industry has been asking for.
Alongside it, the BWO and WindEurope signed an Offshore Wind Industry Declaration backing a long-term European build-out of 300 GW. In return for firmer political commitments, the industry pledged to cut the electricity production costs of offshore projects by 30 per cent in real terms. “European countries are moving closer together in the North Sea and intensifying their cooperation,” said Hans Sohn, the BWO’s head of policy and communications, framing predictable volumes and stable tenders as the precondition for investment in projects, ports, vessels and skilled workers.
Protecting investments already made
Confidence also depends on not moving the goalposts retroactively. As the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) drew up its new General Electricity Network Tariff System, known as AgNes, it proposed exempting existing offshore wind farms and already-tendered projects from a planned capacity charge. A study the BWO commissioned from consultancy Neon argued that generator network charges would not steer offshore siting in any case — those sites, grid connections and connection capacities are centrally planned by the state, so there is no location decision left to influence — while raising costs and, through higher CfD bids underwritten by the federal budget, simply shifting the bill.
Thimm welcomed the regulator’s stance, noting it had “clearly sharpened its position” since the initial February proposals, while pressing for a formal, permanent exemption rather than a provisional one.
The Bundesrat moves
Germany’s upper house, the Bundesrat, then adopted a resolution — introduced by North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony — that took up much of the BWO’s agenda, from CfD-based auction design to cross-border cooperation. It called on the federal government to table a draft amendment to the Offshore Wind Energy Act before the summer recess, so a new auction design could apply to tenders from 2027.
The resolution also backed a mechanism the industry has pushed for: a legally regulated route for developers to voluntarily hand back sites awarded between 2023 and 2025 that no longer look viable, freeing up seabed and grid-connection capacity for rapid re-tendering rather than leaving it blocked. And it reaffirmed the statutory target of at least 70 GW of offshore wind by 2045.
The Baltic connection
Much of the cost case for that 70 GW target now rests on cooperation across borders. A Fraunhofer IWES study for the BWO and energy-industry association BDEW found that connecting offshore wind farms in the Danish and Swedish exclusive economic zones directly to the German grid — so-called radial connections — could raise electricity yields by up to 13 per cent while cutting system costs, with up to 20 GW built in neighbouring waters but counted towards Germany’s own target. Spreading the farms out reduces the wake-shadowing that eats into output when turbines are packed into the German Bight.
The industrial dividend is already visible on the Baltic coast. Dajin Offshore, China’s largest private manufacturer of offshore wind foundations, has contracted the Polish state-owned Szczecin Shipyard “Wulkan” to fabricate at least 40 internal platform sets for Nordseecluster B, the RWE and Norges Bank Investment Management project of up to 1.6 GW in the German North Sea, due to enter commercial operation from 2029. The 47-million-zloty contract involves around 200 people and signals how a German build-out feeds work back into Baltic ports and yards.
What to watch next
The reset is real but unfinished. Its credibility now turns on execution: whether the government converts the Bundesrat’s recommendations into a passed amendment in time for the 2027 tenders, and whether a two-sided CfD model actually brings bidders back after two failed rounds. If it holds, Germany’s course-correction becomes a template for how a mature offshore market restarts after a stumble — and one wired ever more tightly into its Baltic neighbours.
