Christian Sonnemann, Associate Director, Wood Thilsted
Recently, I wrote about the cost challenges in navigating the next era of offshore wind. I argued that value in the next generation of offshore wind could be created through robust, flexible scenario planning, which could in turn drive confidence in the delivery of projects when external factors change.
With major country-focused allocation rounds underway in Europe, and with challenges for project developers, fabricators and the supply chain increasing, it is clear that winning seabed rights or auctions no longer guarantees a bankable project.
Costs escalate when design, procurement, and fabrication are optimised in isolation. The solution: early, structured collaboration between developers, fabricators, and the supply chain. This removes avoidable cost drivers not by squeezing margins, but by aligning project schedules, engineering, factory realities, and logistics.
In practice, this approach has delivered 10–20% savings on foundation scopes, while improving utilisation, reducing premiums, and smoothing schedules – creating tangible benefits for developers, fabricators and suppliers.
True Collaboration
As projects ramp up, teams become stretched. Budgets, time and attention run thin. Collaboration often gives way to hurried negotiations with a focus on price pressure.
Wood Thilsted Advisory has identified the need to bring developers and fabricators together at an early project stage to collaborate on a more accurate and transparent picture of schedule flexibility, costs, timelines, and optimisation potentials.
The remedy is to front‑load collaboration and establish a concise, shared view of:
- What the product must do and where unnecessary add-ons can be taken out.
- How and when the product actually needs to be finalised and moved; and what that implies for staging and T&I set-up.
- Where risk premiums and uncertainties enter the price; and how to retire them.
Establish this together at the outset and three good things happen:
- Perceived and actual risk drop → premiums shrink.
- Utilisation rises → factories spend more hours on value‑add work and fewer on stop‑start resets.
- Schedules smooth → fewer bottlenecks and less “peak/idle” waste.
Indeed, the current framework in which developers, fabricators and the supply chain interact is often creating overloaded capacity met with periods of inactivity that makes industry planning and the wider goal of meeting Net Zero targets an increasing challenge. This situation will become more acute as developed economies race to meet clean energy targets.
Positive Outcomes and Cost Reduction
The result of this enhanced dialogue and collaboration is that projects are de-risked for both developer and fabricator and that there is much more clarity on optimized cost levels.
For the developer, this model provides a better-informed pricing structure for the business case. The model also provides a clear picture of potential costs as opposed to basing bid budgets on RFQ snapshots without understanding optimisation potentials and assumptions for the pricing.
For the fabricator, there is less financial uncertainty and lower costs through balanced allocation and steadier factory utilisation, reduced risk premiums, and targeted design input that supports factory efficiency.
Wood Thilsted Advisory believes that this is a true ‘win-win’ scenario: Developers and suppliers benefit from an experienced partner with whom to work with to remove costs and strengthen business cases, as well as improve project efficiency and confidence.
This approach works. We have executed it in global projects, where we consistently see a 10–20% total saving on £400-800 million foundation scopes when engineering, execution, logistics and supply chain planning are optimised together. This has been enabled by removing avoidable cost drivers rather than applying price pressure. It is a model the sector should adopt now as fabricators and the supply chain plan for 2027–2030.
Several things are clear. This approach supports a holistic programme to map out projects and their full financial scope. It places a premium on preparation, experience and insights. It is something that the global offshore wind sector must consider now.
Christian Sonnemann is an Associate Director in offshore wind engineering consultancy Wood Thilsted’s Advisory business unit that delivers high-impact strategy services for the offshore wind sector. He is based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
About Wood Thilsted’s Advisory services
Wood Thilsted is known as the partner of choice for offshore wind developers seeking a dedicated advisor committed to their success, setting new standards for how projects are supported from early ideation and development to seamless execution.
Wood Thilsted’s Advisory business unit bridges technical, commercial and strategic expertise to deliver tailored solutions that create lasting value. It aims to address immediate project needs as well as a lifecycle view, helping clients achieve the best outcomes across all project phases.