Posted on April 23, 2026
Offshore wind development has all but screeched to a halt in the United States amid the Trump administration’s unrelenting attacks. But in the rest of the world, it’s another story.
Wealthy and developing economies alike are embracing the energy source as they look to build out supplies of domestic and renewable electricity — a goal that is growing more urgent as the Middle East conflict leaves many nations short on oil and natural gas.
Global offshore wind capacity rose by over 9 gigawatts in 2025, up 16% from the previous year’s installations, bringing the world’s total offshore wind capacity to about 92 GW, the Global Wind Energy Council said in its latest annual report, released Monday. Land-based wind projects saw record gains, adding over 155 GW in 2025.
All told, nearly 1,300 GW of wind turbine installations are now providing power to nearly 140 countries worldwide, according to the international industry group.
About half that cumulative capacity — both offshore and on land — comes from China, which is building renewable energy at a breakneck speed to meet its surging power demand and reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.
The United Kingdom is also a global leader for offshore wind in particular. It added over a gigawatt last year, bringing its total offshore capacity to nearly 17 GW. In January, the government moved to grow that figure further, awarding 8.4 gigawatts’ worth of contracts to project developers. The auction, which was Europe’s biggest for offshore wind to date, set power prices that will be significantly cheaper than those from a new gas-fired power plant.
The U.K. joined nine European Union nations earlier this year in vowing to build 100 GW of the resource to transform the gusty North Sea into “the world’s largest clean energy reservoir” in order to help meet the region’s climate change targets.
Other land-constrained nations, primarily in Asia, are poised to propel the fledgling industry forward in the coming years. Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Vietnam have all recently launched auctions and programs to install gigawatts’ worth of turbines to power their growing economies and curb their dependence on oil and gas imports.
“Despite what you hear from the White House, offshore wind is alive and well,” said Rebecca Williams, deputy CEO of the Global Wind Energy Council. “Across a new set of emerging markets, we’re seeing governments really double down on momentum, and we’re also seeing that from the usual suspects.”
Globally, offshore wind installations are expected to continue growing over the coming years, albeit at a slower pace than once anticipated.
Between 2027 and 2030, countries other than China are expected to add an average of 11 GW in offshore wind installations every year — almost triple the levels from 2022 to 2024, according to the research firm BloombergNEF. China alone could add the same amount over that three-year period.
Farther ahead, the total capacity of offshore wind farms globally is set to reach about 486 GW by 2040, BNEF has forecast.
“In general, there is lots of negative news around offshore wind … but it is still a very, very large and global industry,” said Kajsa Jernetz, an offshore wind analyst at BNEF.
That negative news is real, however, with the most dramatic impact happening in the United States.
Since last year, President Donald Trump has halted new offshore wind leasing and tried, unsuccessfully, to stop construction of five in-progress wind farms in the U.S., three of which are now sending power to the East Coast’s grid.
Even before the politically driven attacks, project developers worldwide faced financial hardships and logistical challenges. High inflation and rising equipment costs, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine, have made what are already multibillion-dollar energy installations even more expensive. Now, however, global energy firms like Denmark’s Ørsted and Norway’s Equinor have taken an additional hit after they were forced to pause work on fully permitted projects and cancel future developments off America’s Atlantic coast.
“That level of volatility is extreme when it comes to any infrastructure sector,” Williams said of the Trump administration’s actions, adding that they have had a “chilling effect on the offshore wind industry as a whole.”
Developers have reduced their investment budgets for the near term, due in part to U.S. headwinds but also to other major policy and supply chain challenges in China and Europe.
In 2025, companies won bids to build over 11 GW of future offshore wind capacity — one-fifth of the amount awarded in 2024, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.
For Europe in particular, “this is part of a bigger, negative spiral for offshore wind, where costs have increased, which means that projects get delayed, and in turn, project viability decreases,” Jernetz said. In response, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands announced plans to support developers by providing minimum revenue guarantees for offshore installations.
The energy crisis caused by the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran is expected to exacerbate some of the supply chain challenges faced by offshore wind — and every other major infrastructure project.
But on balance, the Middle East crisis is likely to bolster the case for investing in offshore wind, the CEO of Ørsted, Rasmus Errboe, told Reuters earlier this month. Errboe was speaking about Europe, where gas prices are surging again, four years after the region drastically cut imports from Russia, spurring a severe gas-supply crunch.
But the same is true for other regions that rely heavily on imported fossil fuels to generate electricity, Williams said. Southeast Asia, for example, is seeing fuel prices soar because of disrupted flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point for much of the world’s oil and gas supply, which has prompted Asian governments to adopt price caps and ration reserves.
“What we’re seeing now is an urgent sense from countries around their own energy security, resilience, and the desire to have self-determination,” Williams said. “In this really shifting geopolitical landscape … that imperative becomes ever more acute, and that’s the dynamic we’re seeing play out.”
