Action Plan: Offshore Wind Energy

The plan to expand offshore wind energy to a considerable extent is driven by the overall climate protection target to increase the amount of renewable energies in electricity supply. However, in many Member States planning and approval processes are not yet meeting the demand to offer fast and target-oriented solutions to issues raised. In particular, transmitting electricity from the coast to inland consumption centres will be costly and time-consuming.

Compared to single wind installations on land, offshore wind installation offer substantial advantages in terms of efficiency. Therefore, approval processes for such installations should be expedited and simplified. However, it is difficult to estimate how efficient investments in offshore wind installations actually are as long as green electricity is promoted in many Member States through purchase guarantees and fixed feed-in tariffs.