Three words. Two days.

One question the sector hasn’t quite asked yet.

A reflection on two days at Global Offshore Wind 2026  -  Manchester Central  -  16–17 June 2026

I went to Manchester last week as a newcomer. Advance has spent thirty years working on the human and organisational dimensions of major infrastructure delivery — in railway, in water, and increasingly in energy as well as many other complex delivery sectors in the UK and internationally — but offshore wind is territory we are choosing to enter deliberately and with appropriate humility. I said before I went that curiosity was the right credential for a first visit to a sector I do not yet know from the inside. That held. What I want to offer from the two days at GOW26 is not a summary but a reflection: the thinking of someone who arrived to listen carefully and left with a specific, honest challenge for a sector he found genuinely impressive.

Three words came up, across the plenaries, the fringe sessions, and the conversations on the exhibition floor, with enough consistency to be treated not as coincidence but as a signal. Integration. Collaboration. Standardisation. I wrote them in my notebook on the first morning and they were still being used, in variations, as the conference closed on the second. They are worth taking seriously, because the sector was not using them interchangeably. Each carried a distinct weight.

Integration was the system challenge: connecting generation to grid, aligning cross-border transmission, building the physical infrastructure to carry offshore power to where it is needed. Gus Jaspert at the Crown Estate put it most directly: systems issues need system-level solutions. Collaboration was the relationship challenge, holding together the competing interests of developers, supply chain, government, and communities in a way that actually produces delivery rather than professionally polite friction. Standardisation was named as the prerequisite for industrialisation, the discipline that must precede scale if scale is to be sustainable rather than simply large. Tom Quinn at the ORE Catapult put the problem clearly: if you industrialise against divergent standards, you lock cost and complexity into the system at the very moment you are trying to drive them out.

What struck me about all three words is that they are fundamentally organisational rather than technical. Integration is not principally an engineering challenge; it is a governance challenge between organisations operating on different timescales, under different mandates, with different risk appetites. Collaboration is not a behavioural aspiration; it is a structural condition that either exists or does not at the level of the programmes where delivery actually happens. And standardisation, as Richard Britton of Nadara observed with commendable candour, is very difficult to achieve across a competitive market where the incentive at the programme level is to optimise locally rather than collectively. The sector knows this and is naming it. The question is what it does with that knowledge.

The political dimension was larger than I expected
I went to GOW26 expecting a sector conference and exhibition in the conventional sense: technical sessions, supply chain discussions, investment panels. What I encountered across both days was something with a considerably more political character, and I mean that in the best sense of the word.

Three government ministers addressed the conference. Michael Shanks MP, the Minister of State for Energy, used his Day One slot to frame offshore wind explicitly as a national security imperative rather than an environmental or economic one. The UK government spent £44 billion subsidising gas during the Ukraine crisis. In the last six months, fixed-price CfD contracts have paid back £500 million from the wind energy sector. The fiscal arithmetic was offered not as a boast but as an argument: sovereign energy capability is the alternative to geopolitical exposure, and offshore wind is the most credible route to that sovereignty available to a nation with the UK’s coastline.

On Day Two, Adam Price MS, Cabinet Secretary for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy in the Welsh Government, made a more intellectually ambitious case. He reframed the offshore wind conversation in terms of industrial history: for two centuries, the logic of economic geography dictated that power moved to where the factories were. Coal was shipped to mills. That logic is now inverting. In a world organised around renewable energy, industry will organise around where the power is cheapest and most reliable, which is where the renewable resource is strongest. For Wales, historically fifteen percent less productive than the UK average, the Celtic Sea represents not merely an energy opportunity but an economic reorganisation of the first order. The next chapter of Wales, he said, is written out at sea, where its previous chapter was written underground.

Stephen Gethins MSP, the Scottish Government’s Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Energy, described Scotland’s 40 GW-plus pipeline as a potentially game-changing opportunity capable of supporting around 50,000 additional jobs and an estimated £100 billion in capital investment.* His ask of the Westminster government was specific: reform the transmission charging regime that currently imposes the highest network costs on the projects situated furthest from demand but closest to the wind resource. That structural inequity, he argued, is within the UK government’s power to address, and the failure to address it is a real constraint on Scotland’s ability to deliver on a pipeline the nation did nothing wrong to win.

What connected all three ministerial contributions was something the GWEC’s Global Offshore Wind Report 2026, published the week before GOW26, had already identified as the sector’s defining frame: offshore wind is no longer constrained by ambition alone. Increasingly, it is constrained by execution capacity. Delayed auctions, unfavourable public narrative, grid bottlenecks, permitting backlogs and constrained supply chains are not abstract industry challenges; these are the friction points that keep countries locked into fossil fuel dependence. The ministers were, in different registers, making the same argument: the political case is made, the economic case is made, the security case is compelling, and what must now follow is delivery.

This is a word that carries a specific weight in Advance’s world. We have spent three decades watching the distance between a programme’s ambition and its execution. The distance is rarely a function of insufficient intent or inadequate capital. It is almost always a function of organisational and human factors that programmes are consistently unprepared for, because those factors are consistently treated as secondary to the technical and commercial architecture.

The thread that ran through both days
If you were to reduce GOW26 to a single persistent request from the sector to itself and to government, it would be this: give us consistency, give us visibility, and let us cooperate properly.

Consistency, because the annual deployment drumbeat that allows a supply chain to make investment decisions is more valuable than the record-breaking allocation rounds that generate headlines. Mairi Dudley from Orsted put it plainly: she wants auctions to be boring. Not less ambitious, but more predictable. The boom-and-bust pattern creates exactly the opposite conditions to those needed for industrialisation, producing peaks of activity followed by gaps in which capability atrophies, companies restructure, and the learning curve that standardisation requires gets interrupted before it has a chance to compound.

Visibility, because the forward pipeline clarity that gives supply chain organisations the confidence to invest in credentials, infrastructure, and people is currently missing beyond AR8. Clark McFarlane of the Offshore Wind Growth Partnersip (OWGP) said it best when quoting someone else in the line from the industrial strategy session: “money is nice, but work is better”. The supply chain will invest if it can see what it is investing towards. It will not invest, regardless of the funds available, if the pipeline is invisible.

Cooperation, because the word came up more than any other, from the most senior voices, in the most varied contexts. Tara Singh closed the conference by saying the sector’s challenges are not in competition with each other, they are interconnected, and addressing them requires all of us working together with purpose. The GWEC’s action plan makes stronger government and industry partnership its second priority. Dan McGrail described GB Energy as open to sharing ideas and new business models. The language of cooperation is everywhere in this sector. What is less present is a systematic account of what genuine cooperation requires at the level of the programmes that are supposed to deliver it.

That absence is not a criticism. It is the observation of a sector that is approaching a harder question without yet being sure how to ask it. And it is the gap where Advance, despite the absence of an offshore wind track record, has something substantive to contribute.

The question nobody quite asked
Christian Sonneman of Wood Thilsted gave a fringe session on Day One that was, for my money, the most important piece of content at the conference. His subject was partnership versus transactional procurement, and his argument was pointed: the sector is winning negotiations and losing projects. You can squeeze supplier margins, but you cannot take underlying cost out of the system by doing so. The risk that is transferred rather than resolved ends up somewhere, and in a CfD structure it ends up in the bid price, which is precisely what drives up the strike prices the Minister identifies as unacceptable at AR8.

Andrew Deeley at the Low Carbon Contracts Company made a complementary observation from a different vantage point. Managing 550 CfD relationships and 50 GW of contracted capacity, he described what the post-award period needs in three words: clarity, trust, adaptability. The time after the auction, he said, is when the hard work begins, moving from the euphoria of allocation to the practical reality of six hundred pages of contract and the organisational challenge of actually building something. The relationships needed for that transition are not automatic. They are built, deliberately, through sustained engagement between parties who are genuinely trying to solve the same problem rather than manage their own exposure to it.

The GWEC report’s own contributors state that workforce planning can no longer sit behind engineering, procurement, and supply chain strategy. It must be treated as critical infrastructure for the energy transition. When workforce development is approached with proper foresight, projects become more predictable, mobilisation becomes more efficient and operational risk is reduced.

All of this is, to use the GWEC’s own language, the execution capacity challenge. But none of it describes what actually happens in the window between a CfD being awarded and a programme being genuinely mobilised and operational. The conditions that window needs - clarity, trust, adaptability, genuine partnership rather than transactional procurement - were named at GOW26 with impressive precision. The methodology for building those conditions, deliberately and early, before the patterns that determine whether a programme succeeds or struggles have had time to set, was not.

That is the question the sector is approaching without yet asking directly. It matters, because every year the mobilisation infrastructure does not match the deployment ambition is another year the gap between contracts awarded and gigawatts delivered widens.

Why Advance is leaning in, and what B Corp has to do with it
I said at the outset that I went to GOW26 with appropriate humility. I want to be equally direct about what I left with.

Advance is leaning into offshore wind, not tentatively exploring it. The reasons are not primarily commercial, though the commercial case is clear enough. They are principled. The energy transition is the defining delivery challenge of this generation, and the evidence across both days of GOW26 - and across the GWEC report and the Clean Energy Council’s annual Australia report I wrote about last week - is that the gap preventing ambition from becoming delivery is exactly the gap Advance has spent over thirty years working in: the organisational and collaborative foundations of major programme delivery, and whether the people and teams doing the work are genuinely set up to work together under pressure, or whether they default to the defensive and the transactional when the difficulty comes.

We are a B Corp certified business. I need to be specific about what that means in this context, because it is not a credential and it would be wrong to present it as one. B Corp certification means we have embedded accountability to the communities we work in, to the people we work with, to the wider environment in which we operate, into the legal and operating structure of the business. Not into our reporting. Into how we make decisions when commercial pressure and values come into conflict.

This matters because offshore wind is not a neutral commercial sector. It is, as all three ministers made clear in different ways, a sector with a foundational environmental and social obligation as well as its own challenges in that area despite being a “green energy” industry – let’s not gloss over the challenges of seabed habitat protection and working in and around the fisheries industry. Its social licence is not guaranteed; it is earned through the quality of engagement with the communities where the infrastructure is built and where the economic benefits are, or are not, realised. The misinformation and public trust session on Day Two was the most candid acknowledgement I have heard from inside any major infrastructure sector that this challenge is structural rather than communicative. Elouise Smith of Nadara said the sector needs to get out of its technocratic echo chamber, others said that offshore wind is so much more than electrons. That is a facilitation challenge before it is a communications challenge, and it is one Advance has decades of experience in.

This week I am at Reset Connect in London, where the conversation shifts from clean energy specifically to sustainability in business and industry more broadly. I am carrying from Manchester to the ExCeL a question I believe travels across sectors: how do organisations actually deliver on their values under commercial pressure, not how do they report on them? GOW26 was one version of that question. Reset Connect will be another.

The sector’s challenges are interconnected, as Tara Singh said in closing. But interconnection is not the same as integration, and integration is not the same as working together with purpose. The sector is clear on the first. It is working towards the second. The third is where the real difficulty sits, and where Advance intends to contribute.

* Source: reNEWS reporting on GOW26, 17 June 2026.