The Offshore Wind 2050 Partnership — comprising seven Danish organisations — has advanced several policy recommendations to help Denmark realise its 40-80GW offshore wind target by 2050, including ensuring regulatory stability and stimulating hydrogen demand.
The report aims to provide "concrete" policy recommendations that can provide the "political framework" to deliver on the country's 2050 ambitions, recognising past errors and uncertainties, while noting the practical environmental limitations.
The report pays particular attention to investment stability in its recommendations. It urges the government to take "must happen soon" decisions, such as moving forward with proposed rules that offshore wind farms in Danish waters can directly connect to foreign grids, as well as an end to stop-start tenders, which reduce confidence in the investment environment.
Denmark's follow-up tender to the 1GW Thor wind project failed in 2024, with a rerun not completed until last month.
A stable investment outlook is particularly important, the report said, noting that Denmark is not building offshore capacity in a vacuum and is competing for investment with neighbouring markets.
The report also focuses on electrification as a key driver of the demand needed to support rapid and substantial offshore wind build out, urging for both short-term domestic policy moves and broader co-ordination at EU level.
The co-authors are seeking changes to stand-alone battery regulations to allow siting at rural substations, as well as other planning changes to make it easier to co-locate large consumers near renewable generation outside of urban areas, to soak up production.
Looking ahead, they also hope for EU-level policy to broaden the available support for electrification beyond large firms to small and medium-sized enterprises, particularly access to EIB instruments. And they ask the European Commission to align several large initiatives, such as the grids package and the electrification action plan, so they can work alongside one another.
Other policy recommendations focus on incentivising industrial hydrogen production, expected to be a large consumer of electricity generated by Danish offshore wind, seeking ways to guarantee stable investment conditions and offtake agreements in neighbouring markets.
That runs alongside initiatives targeting grid infrastructure, supply chains and labour forces, which are designed to ensure robustness for the European wind industry by reducing outside dependence, in addition to sectoral growth, the report suggests.
The partnership comprises the Danish Industry Confederation, the metalworkers union, Insurance and Pension Denmark, renewables lobby Green Power Denmark, the Chamber of Commerce, Denmark's Think Tank for the Ocean and Hydrogen Denmark.
