United Kingdom
Offshore wind's reference market — but the 2030 target now runs well ahead of the delivery trajectory.
Assessment
as of 2026-06-26The UK is the reference offshore-wind market: the first large arrays date to the late 2000s and the regime is the most "unbundled" anywhere — The Crown Estate and Crown Estate Scotland auction the seabed, and a separate Contracts for Difference auction sets the offtake. Deep developer, supply-chain and grid experience make it the market a mature regime is measured against; only China's state-directed fleet is larger.
Delivery is behind the headline ambition. The Clean Power 2030 Action Plan implies ~43–50 GW by 2030, but operational plus under-construction capacity is a fraction of that and the gap is widening. The 2023 CfD Allocation Round 5 cleared no offshore wind at all — a pricing wake-up after the strike price was set below buildable economics — and although later rounds re-secured volume at higher prices, the pipeline must roughly triple this decade to hit target. Buildout is real and active but trailing the trajectory.
Low. Offshore wind enjoys durable cross-party backing, the CfD mechanism is well-established, and seabed rights are administered by a stable, independent Crown Estate. The live risks are economic — supply chain inflation, grid-connection queues, and strike prices that have to stay buildable — rather than political reversal.
Stable-to-positive. The market will keep clearing large volumes and remains the anchor of the European pipeline, but hitting 2030 depends on sustained high-priced CfD rounds, grid reform, and supply-chain capacity. Expect steady delivery that lands meaningfully short of the Clean Power 2030 figure — a policy plan, not a statute — while staying the deepest market globally.
Stable cross-party support and an intact CfD framework; risk is delivery and supply-chain economics, not policy reversal.
State of the market
as of 2026-09-09Teal line = the Hafrok Expected Buildout (confidence-weighted): 68 GW of live pipeline weights to 42 GW expected to complete, timed by each project's COD distribution (mass beyond 2038 not drawn). Bands are the unweighted dated pipeline — the Expected Buildout also models on-hold and undated projects, so it can sit above them. 9.9 GW of pipeline has no dated COD and is not in the bands.
How this line is made
The Expected Buildout line answers one question: of the pipeline announced today, how much actually gets built, and when? It is not a scenario and not a target tracker — it is the database's live pipeline, passed through two filters measured from the industry's own delivery record.
Whether a project completes. Every project in development carries a completion weight, banded Delivering / Expected / Prospective / Fragile. A proposal — a site where no authority has yet granted rights — carries none and sits outside this line entirely; it is listed, not counted. The starting point is the historical completion rate of its lifecycle stage — of projects that reached construction, 97% delivered; financed but not yet building, 92%; consented without financing, 75%; early development, 61%; on hold, 15%. That base rate is then adjusted by what the project has actually secured (offtake, grid, consents, investment decision) and decays if a project sits quiet past its stage's normal dwell time.
When it delivers. Each project also carries a completion-date distribution — a shape, not a single year, right-skewed because offshore wind slips late far more often than it runs early. The peak sits on a rule-based expected date chained from the project's latest achieved milestone; the width of the late tail is fitted to how far past their announced dates real projects actually landed: builders slip tight (68% on time, n=158), financed projects tighter still (72%, n=101), consented-only projects carry the fat tail — 25% land three or more years late (n=133). A stated date faster than any comparable project has ever achieved is floored to the achievable window and flagged, never taken at face value.
The line is the sum, across every live project, of capacity × completion weight × the probability it delivers in each year. For projects already under construction, a share of expected capacity is counted at first power — turbines start generating before a wind farm is fully commissioned — so a market's chart can show capacity arriving a year before a project's stated completion date. Delivered history is metered fact; the line inherits every assumption above and nothing else.
Honest limits. The weights are calibrated on a fleet whose failures have so far been overwhelmingly pre-financing — completion rates after FID rest on a record with few failures, so they are ceilings, not guarantees. The slip fitted on consented projects is the loosest (the "three or more years late" bucket spans many years). Policy shocks arrive faster than base rates move — the weights see a stop-work order only as its lifecycle consequences accrue. And the line redistributes as the database learns: it is re-derived on every data refresh, not frozen.
Full per-project workings — each project's weight, band, expected date and distribution — are on its project page. Calibration v2.0-phase0 · generated 2026-09-09; every figure above is read from the generated calibration file, never typed.
Auction outlook
forecast · 5 rounds trackedAR8 opens July 2026 — confirmed by the government in March 2026 and brought forward from the earlier mid/late-2026 expectation — with a new "Other Deepwater Offshore Wind" category for hybrid/deepwater fixed solutions distinct from fixed-bottom and floating. Framework and budget documents are on gov.uk; part of the stated pathway of at least 12 GW across rounds AR7-AR9. No pre-assigned projects (open competitive round). […]
A single-site re-tender, separate from Leasing Round 6. The Morgan site (up to 1.5 GW, Irish Sea, Round 4 award 2021) was handed back to The Crown Estate when the JERA Nex bp / EnBW JV discontinued development in January 2026 after failing to win a CfD in AR7. The Crown Estate announced its intention to re-tender on 8 June 2026 and LAUNCHED the process on 24 July 2026: a "streamlined and proportionate" competitive tender run as a transparent rising-clock auction, with bids forming a Site Exclusivity Fee that only becomes payable when the project enters lease (bid as a lump sum, paid phased ove […]
Third round in the AR7-AR9 pathway; no firm timetable or budget. Government states AR9 runs "depending on the speed at which projects deploy" — contingent. A codified ANNUAL CfD cadence is NOT confirmed in an official source (intent only).
Announced intent with an indicative launch window; not yet launched (market + NESO engagement through 2026). ~6 GW indicative, predominantly fixed-bottom, focused off NE England; capacity/boundaries to be refined in 2026.
LOWEST firmness in the UK set: a public statement of intent only ("certainly on the horizon"), no leasing process, timetable, volume or date. Projects characterised as likely to deliver beyond 2030. No primary CES publication yet (trade-press statement) — that absence itself confirms the aspirational status.