Christian Sonnemann, Associate Director
What is the Hamburg Declaration all about?
With global attention firmly on energy markets and following the success of WindEurope in Madrid, it feels the right time to revisit one of this year’s major announcements – the Hamburg Declaration – and how it might shape the future of European offshore wind.
Signed in January 2026 by the nine member countries of the North Sea’s Energy Cooperation (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom plus Iceland as an Observer), the Hamburg Declaration is a clean energy agreement that aims to bolster energy security through green sources – offshore wind, grid enhancement, hydrogen and interconnectors.
Ambitiously, the Declaration aims to:
‘Transform the North Seas into the largest clean energy hub in the world, building in particular on offshore renewable energy generation and strong interconnection’.
It marks a clear statement of intent from European nations to accelerate the roll out of offshore wind with a stated goal of 100 GW of offshore wind by 2030 and 15 GW of new wind delivery per year between 2031-2040.
It aims to address offshore energy infrastructure by bolstering energy independence, improving cross-border grids, and developing offshore hybrid assets to create a shared clean energy space.
With its focus on reinvigorating the supply chain it has created renewed optimism into the future of European offshore wind.
A Supply Chain Perspective
With its pledges to secure supply chains and to simplify and speed up permitting, the Declaration is a boost for large, small and medium-sized companies operating in European offshore wind.
It represents a pivot to Europe from the past few years where the focus on scale in offshore wind projects has resulted in a more globalised focus.
The Declaration in turn has brought greater clarity and confidence to the supply chain, something evidenced in an accompanying industry declaration from over 100 firms, with pledges to secure supply chains and speed up permitting.
With its ethos of closer pan-European collaboration, the agreement aims to smooth out the peaks and level the troughs to produce a more coordinated build out of wind projects. This opens up new opportunities to create a more stable platform for growth.
Indeed, the Hamburg Declaration represents a new platform to create stronger projects by encouraging ‘portfolio thinking’, which can create stronger and more valuable individual projects over time.
In a European market with consistent, long-term buildout, developers who adopt portfolio-level thinking can:
- Create more value in each single project, not less, by benefitting from scalability, project stability and replicability.
- Deliver projects that are more robust, more predictable, and easier to finance.
- Secure the best European talent as companies will be able to maintain a healthy pipeline of opportunities and not, for example, have to employ, downsize and reemploy qualified staff continually from across different parts of Europe. Offshore wind must remain an attractive sector for the best talent.
Portfolio thinking can increase single‑project value by:
- Enabling product development rather than one‑off designs.
- Allowing standardisation where it protects value (specifications, design philosophy).
- Embedding systematically learnings and optimisations from earlier projects into:
- Specifications.
- Product design.
- Execution strategies.
- Reducing late changes, surprises, and execution risk, which directly supports bankability.
This matters when projects are challenged because portfolio-level developers have more mechanisms to sustain value when a project is under pressure by:
- Having the ability to rebalance supply chain capacity across projects.
- Deploying more flexibility in sequencing.
- Requiring less need for value-destructive emergency decisions.
The result is that projects become more robust and we should see a more coordinated build-out of offshore wind across the Continent as a result.
Providing a Counterbalance to Failed Auction Rounds and a Focus on Relationships
Finally, the Declaration represents a counterbalance to several failed European auction rounds where mature economies such as Denmark, Germany and UK failed to read market conditions correctly and were unable to secure developers at the right conditions to progress new offshore wind projects.
Now with a new structure in place, the focus is shifting to getting as many new, cheap, secure green electrons on stream as possible.
Wood Thilsted’s view is that embedding a portfolio view is crucial for projects to succeed – our company’s delivery of engineering solutions and project support over ten years bears that out.
Our work with the supply chain also tells us that relationships must be built over time and maintained throughout on a continuous basis – this longer-term collaboration supports clients.
By integrating this portfolio mind-set to the positive framework of Hamburg we hope to see a reinvigorated European offshore wind market.
This article was written by Christian Sonnemann, Associate Director in Wood Thilsted’s Advisory business unit. Christian can be contacted on: cso@woodthilsted.com