Editorial of Ship&Offshore 8/2020: A virtuous circle

Kathrin Lau, Deputy Editor-in-Chief

An extraordinary year is coming to an end. While we are certainly all hoping for more normality in 2021, we are also very aware that there will be many more difficult months ahead.

The recent – not surprising – announcement by Hamburg Messe und Congress (HMC) that the leading maritime trade fair SMM will not be held as a hybrid event in February, but as a pure digital platform, is another sign that the industry needs to adapt to a changed market environment, especially with regard to business contacts. At the beginning of December, the purely digital exhibition WindEnergy Hamburg, also organised by HMC, may be a good indicator of how trend-setting formats like this can be.

Speaking of wind energy, the world’s offshore wind sector continues to develop steadily, with a range of positive developments leading to very optimistic sentiment. This is one of the results of the latest WindEnergy trend:index, which has been produced by WindEnergy Hamburg, in cooperation with market research institute wind:research.

Even Covid-19 seems to have little impact on the positive future outlook for the coming years: the majority of those surveyed in the trend:index project believe that the corona pandemic will have no adverse impact, and possibly a positive outcome for the wind industry. These results come as the European Commission announced a draft plan to increase the number of EU offshore wind farms by 250%, taking capacity from 23 GW today to 60 GW by 2030 and 300 GW by 2050.

Promising news also comes specifically from Germany as well as a conglomerate of EU Baltic Sea countries. In the former, the recent amendment to the Windenergie-auf-See-Gesetz (Wind Energy at Sea Act) is definitely the right step for a further expansion of offshore wind energy. The country’s expansion targets of 20 GW by 2030 and 40 GW by 2040 not only create important planning security for the industry, but also make it clear that offshore wind will make a decisive contribution to achieving the climate targets and creating value in Germany as a business location. This is an important economic signal both for Germany and Europe against a backdrop of reduced post-pandemic industrial activity, which could last until 2025-26.

What’s more, at the end of September, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Germany signed the “Baltic Sea Offshore Wind Joint Declaration of Intent” – a further clear signal for the development of offshore wind energy in the region, aimed at strengthening cooperation across the sector.

An expansion of offshore wind energy is bound to promote more demand for innovative, larger and more powerful transport, installation and service vessels. As new wind farms move into deeper waters, sophisticated engineering both for wind turbines and the related shipping capacity will continue to develop too. This in turn will generate new revenue streams for designers, builders and equipment suppliers.

Of course, it is also essential for ships in this segment to meet (future) requirements for environmentally and climate-friendly operation, and ultimately, to meet the carbon reduction targets of 2030, 2040 and 2050, respectively. In order to produce suitable carbon-free or e-fuels, Power-to-X technologies, a term which is rightly on everyone’s lips at present, are most likely to be used.

Green hydrogen, the basic element which is needed for the production of such fuels, is generated through renewable energy sources such as offshore wind. So the more offshore wind we can harness, the more electricity can be utilised to develop zero-carbon fuel and the more commercially viable the process gets. Seems like the ideal way to combine ambitious climate protection with social, economic and ecological growth. Ship

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