WIREDGOV

Offshore energy infrastructure is being built at pace, led by offshore wind and electrical interconnectors, but the security architecture needs to keep up.

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Offshore wind has become a strategic system. The UK now operates over 16 GW of installed offshore wind capacity within a 50 GW target for 2030. At the North Sea Summit in Hamburg on 26 January 2026, nine governments, the UK and France among them, reaffirmed the target of up to 300 GW of offshore wind in the North Seas by 2050, with up to 100 GW delivered through cross-border interconnected projects. France's contribution, confirmed at Ostend in 2023 and reaffirmed at Hamburg, is at least 2.1 GW by 2030, rising to between 4.6 and 17 GW by 2050.

The system has, so far, absorbed this growth. Grid integration is keeping pace, supply chains are scaling, and the engineering is no longer the binding constraint. The capacity question is, in the relevant sense, solved.

The security and safety question is not. Defending this infrastructure has not received institutional attention proportionate to its scale. The Hamburg declaration paired the Joint Investment Pact with language on protecting the future grid against ‘physical, cyber or hybrid attacks’, but that language has not yet translated into a coherent operational answer to the basic question: when something happens to an offshore wind farm 40 nautical miles from shore, who is in charge?

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