It was historic. This summer, a cable beneath the Baltic Sea carried the first ever electric  current from an offshore wind farm to the Polish electricity grid. A country long dependent on coal had joined the offshore wind club. 

The timing was revealing. Offshore wind is expanding around the globe, even though the commercial model supporting it has come under strain. The turbines work. Too often, contracts and politics do not.

Global numbers show a wind boom. More than 9.3 gigawatts of offshore wind came online in 2025, taking total capacity to 92.5 gigawatts. Another 50 gigawatts are under construction, and the Global Wind Energy Council expects capacity to reach 420 gigawatts by 2035. 

Yet wind is struggling to keep up with the artificial intelligence buildout that is causing electricity demand to soar. The International Energy Agency expects global data center electricity consumption to roughly double by 2030. US data centers could then consume 9% to 17% of national electricity. At the same time, wind procurement fell in 2025 by 80% from the 2024 record.  Steel is entering the water faster than confidence is entering new contracts.

Although offshore wind can deliver large volumes, it cannot guarantee output at every minute. Batteries can shift electricity across hours and reduce curtailment. They do not by themselves turn variable wind into guaranteed multi-day supply. The International Energy Agency expects renewables to meet much of the growth in data-center demand, without becoming its firm backbone. 

Both political and economic hurdles hold back wind deployment. The European and Asian markets that pioneered offshore wind assumed maturity would allow the state to retreat. That hasn’t happened. Just as wind became price competitive, it became clear that government support remained crucial to decide which risks remain private, which must be shared, and which benefits count beyond the price of electricity. 

In the US, the Trump administration has blocked new development and sought to stop construction. This month, it paid German firm RWE $1.2 billion to abandon its offshore wind projects off the California, Louisiana, and New York coasts. 

Despite the President’s disdain for what he calls “big, ugly windmills,” US wind investment has not collapsed. Federal judges allowed five East Coast projects to resume after the administration failed to establish an immediate national-security case for stopping them. Wind projects are already generating electricity off the coasts of Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts, while additional projects in Virginia and elsewhere along the US East Coast are under construction or nearing completion.

Yet the picture for US offshore wind looks like survival, not momentum. Lease cancellations and federal uncertainty are thinning future contracts. A future administration could reopen the market, but an offshore supply chain cannot be switched on and off by executive order. The industry emerging from the Trump years will be smaller and slower, not dead.

China is moving in the opposite direction, thanks to strong government support. It added 6.6 gigawatts in 2025 and ended the year with 48.4 gigawatts, more than half of the global market. Its advantage is not simply low-cost turbines. China links state-owned developers to a domestic industrial base. Ports and installation vessels are planned alongside turbine factories. At the beginning of this year, it installed the world’s first 20-megawatt offshore turbine. 

While China distributes risk across a state-directed system, Europe debates how to wean itself off of subsidies. The German government pushed offshore wind toward “zero-subsidy” auctions in which developers paid for seabed rights and accepted wholesale-market exposure. But in August 2025, two centrally surveyed sites attracted no bids. The government then postponed the 2026 round to 2027.

Denmark has encountered similar zero-bid auctions, whereas the Netherlands has stepped away from the earlier subsidy-free model after rising costs undermined project economics. Britain has learned the same lesson: after its fifth round of wind auctions received no bids in 2023, it improved the terms and awarded a record 8.4 gigawatts this year. The market did not rediscover the wind. The state changed the allocation of risk. 

The European Union, in turn, is now edging away from the idea that renewable energy auctions should simply reward the lowest bid. Since December 2025, the Net-Zero Industry Act has required governments to look beyond price for at least 30% of annual auction volumes, considering whether projects can actually be delivered on time, whether their supply chains are secure and diversified, and whether they meet sustainability and cybersecurity standards. 

A project that looks cheapest on paper is not cheap if it is never built, reaches the grid years late, or depends on a supply chain that may disappear during a geopolitical crisis. Offshore wind is no longer judged only by how cheaply it can produce clean electricity, but also by whether it strengthens Europe’s industrial capacity and energy security.

The rest of Asia looks more European than Chinese. Mitsubishi withdrew from three Japanese projects totaling about 1.7 gigawatts due to rising costs. Norway’s Equinor this year that it would leave the Japanese market, where it has failed to win any leases in successive auctions. South Korea offers a more hopeful case, with bids for roughly twice the capacity available in its first-half 2026 fixed-price auction. 

The lessons are clear. Offshore wind can supply enormous volumes of electricity, but not guarantee them at every hour; it can strengthen an energy system, but cannot carry one by itself. Its future will depend on governments that understand both its benefits and limitations. 

Poland’s first offshore power project arrives at the moment that this reality becomes impossible to ignore. The country’s initial wind projects rely on long-term government support and are anchored by state-controlled ORLEN and PGE energy companies. Norway’s Equinor is providing much of the financing and expertise. 

It looks like a winning formula. The government’s support makes projects bankable enough to attract private capital. While other European wind auctions attract no buyers, Poland’s first competitive auction won bids to supply 3.435 gigawatts of additional capacity. As the country’s dirty coal runs out, wind will help pick up the slack. 

Maciej Bukowski is the Head of Energy and Resilience Program at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in Warsaw and is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he writes about tech issues and Central European security.