An offshore-wind strategy study: where Europe stands today, the forces and bottlenecks shaping the next fifteen years, four possible futures, and how two energy giants — Ørsted and TotalEnergies — should play them.
An international MBA cohort at SUMAS Sustainability Management School set out to examine how Europe's major energy companies should leverage offshore wind — one of the continent's key renewable infrastructures — through 2040.
Submitted to Jan Erik Meidell · SUMAS Sustainability Management School, Switzerland
The question is no longer whether wind dominates by 2040 — but how fast, at what cost, and who captures the value.
Wind's "share" depends on what you measure. In the total energy mix, oil and gas still dominate. In electricity alone, the transition is already visible — in 2025, wind and solar out-generated fossil fuels for the first time.
By 2026 Europe has roughly 39–41 GW of offshore wind on the grid, the product of two decades of investment. A handful of North Sea nations hold the majority.
Demand rises from 2,730 to 4,530 TWh — not from waste, but from deliberately electrifying transport, heating, industry and AI. Toggle the chart between 2024 and 2040.
Biggest movers: Transport (EVs, ~5M→90M cars) and Buildings (heat pumps). Source: IEA WEO 2024 · European Commission 2024.
Offshore wind grows not because of policy support alone, but because it is economically competitive, strategically necessary, and structurally irreplaceable.
Three structural constraints threaten the growth targets: permitting, grid connection, and the supply chain.
3–5 years in the North Sea, 7–9 in the Mediterranean. Reform aims to halve this — but implementation across 27 states is uneven.
4–10 year queues on ageing, radial networks. Fixing it needs an estimated €584 billion of EU grid investment by 2030.
Vessels can't handle 15 MW+ turbines, ports lack capacity, and subsea cable lead times exceed 36 months.
The metric that turns cost pressure into investment decisions — €/MWh. Floating wind is still structurally pricier.
Beyond 2030, three constraints converge and reinforce one another — and several trace back to a single dependency: China.
Cross the two genuinely independent uncertainties — policy & permitting, and supply-chain resilience — and you map the whole outcome space. Tap a quadrant to explore.
The market doesn't need both firms to play the same way. It needs Ørsted to execute, and TotalEnergies to integrate.
The market through 2040 will not be won on ambition. It will be won on the capacity to execute.
Both companies are structurally better positioned than almost any other developer. If each does what its architecture was built to do, Europe will have two of the world's most capable operators building the energy system the continent needs.
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