Wood Mackenzie’s latest report shows that the global offshore wind operations and maintenance (O&M) market is expected to grow 16% annually to reach €10 billion by 2029. Europe remains the biggest O&M market by region, reaching €5.5 billion by 2029.
Currently, only 1.8GW of global capacity have been operating for over 10 years. By 2029, this figure increases 11 times to 20 GW. By then, 90% of the operational fleet, equivalent to 165 GW will still be under 10 years old.
China is expected to overtake UK’s position as world’s largest single offshore wind O&M market, with 41GW of growth throughout the 2020s, leading to a total of 49GW capacity, equivalent to €1.7 billion of opex opportunities by 2029.
With economies of scale and improved efficiency of asset management and O&M services, global average opex per megawatt is expected to decline 20% between 2020 and 2029 on average.
Europe’s implementation of flexible service operation vessels, remote operation innovations (such as drones), cameras, new digital technologies and the impact of offshore wind clustering have resulted in average opex per megawatt declining for by 44% over the last eight years. These factors will continue to drive opex reduction beyond 2020 further powered by machine learning and deep learning from big data, as well as robotics and autonomous systems that will partially offset labour costs.
