The Bill for Offshore Wind Power Is Rising

With offshore wind projects bleeding cash, governments will have to pay more to hit their clean-energy targets. Recent auctions show just how much more.

Higher prices for steel, labor and debt financing have raised the cost of developing a wind farm by almost 40% since 2019. It is a big problem for developers like Danish energy company Ørsted, which signed power supply agreements a few years ago at prices that no longer cover today’s costs.

Developers’ struggles are having a knock-on effect on the turbine makers that supply them, including Vestas, GE and Siemens Energy. The latter’s wind unit, Siemens Gamesa, lost €4.3 billion in the company’s latest fiscal year, equivalent to $4.7 billion at current exchange rates—although its issues are mainly with faulty onshore turbines rather than offshore ones.

Germany last week stepped in with a multi-billion-euro state-backed guarantee for Siemens Energy, which told investors at a capital markets day on Tuesday that its wind division won’t make a profit until after 2026. GE says its offshore wind business will lose $1 billion this year, and the same again in 2024.

The industry’s deepest challenges are in the U.S., a market that was meant to be the next growth frontier following the Biden administration’s pledge to install 30 gigawatts of offshore capacity by 2030. Instead, developers are taking multibillion-dollar impairments on U.S. projects, or backing out entirely. According to BloombergNEF, of the 21.6 gigawatts of offshore wind power awarded or signed so far in the U.S., a quarter has been canceled and almost another third is at risk.

Governments are now responding by topping up the prices at which they auction off licenses. Britain was forced to raise its guaranteed price for offshore wind power by 66% after a September auction didn’t attract a single bid. The average price in New York’s latest offshore wind auction in October was a fifth higher than previous rounds, according to BloombergNEF, and the bill could rise further as new contracts include inflation protection that will shield developers from future cost pressures.

Paying higher, more flexible prices for fresh contracts might still end up being a cheaper solution for New York than renegotiating old ones. Developers including BP and Equinor asked for increases of 49% on average over what was agreed in their original power supply contracts. They may pull out after getting a no from the state.

Governments and companies had become used to the cost of renewable energy heading only one way. The global average levelized cost of electricity generated by offshore wind—a measure of the minimum price necessary to cover the lifetime costs of a project—has plunged by 66% since 2009, according to BloombergNEF data.

After years of becoming more competitive as a source of power, offshore wind is beginning to look expensive in some markets compared with fossil-fuel alternatives. Globally, new offshore wind projects still work out cheaper than natural gas ones and are level with coal. But offshore wind looks costly in the U.S., partly because the supply chain is so immature and will need heavy investment for several years.

The new reality makes it harder for governments to meet their net-zero targets while also keeping power costs low for the public. But densely populated areas like New York may not have much choice but to exploit offshore wind. Clean alternatives such as land-based wind and solar farms are tough to roll out where space is at a premium.

The European Union is also aware that if governments don’t do more to support local companies like Siemens Energy, Chinese turbine manufacturers that enjoy generous subsidies from Beijing will be only too happy to step in. This would help the EU stay on track with an ambitious plan to increase its offshore wind capacity sevenfold by 2030, but at the expense of the bloc’s energy independence.

Harnessing the winds out at sea is still a key part of countries’ plans to cut their carbon emissions and boost energy security. But governments can no longer pretend that these political objectives can come cheap.

As tech leaders race to bring Windows systems back online after Friday’s software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed around 8.5 million machines worldwide, experts share with CIO Journal their takeaways for preparing for the next major information technology outage.

Be familiar with how vendors develop, test and release their software

IT leaders should hold vendors deeply integrated within IT systems, such as CrowdStrike , to a “very high standard” of development, release quality and assurance, said Neil MacDonald , a Gartner vice president.

“Any security vendor has a responsibility to do extensive regression testing on all versions of Windows before an update is rolled out,” he said.

That involves asking existing vendors to explain how they write software, what testing they do and whether customers may choose how quickly to roll out an update.

“Incidents like this remind all of us in the CIO community of the importance of ensuring availability, reliability and security by prioritizing guardrails such as deployment and testing procedures and practices,” said Amy Farrow, chief information officer of IT automation and security company Infoblox.

Re-evaluate how your firm accepts software updates from ‘trusted’ vendors

While automatically accepting software updates has become the norm—and a recommended security practice—the CrowdStrike outage is a reminder to take a pause, some CIOs said.

“We still should be doing the full testing of packages and upgrades and new features,” said Paul Davis, a field chief information security officer at software development platform maker JFrog . undefined undefined Though it’s not feasible to test every update, especially for as many as hundreds of software vendors, Davis said he makes it a priority to test software patches according to their potential severity and size.

Automation, and maybe even artificial intelligence-based IT tools, can help.

“Humans are not very good at catching errors in thousands of lines of code,” said Jack Hidary, chief executive of AI and quantum company SandboxAQ. “We need AI trained to look for the interdependence of new software updates with the existing stack of software.”

Develop a disaster recovery plan

An incident rendering Windows computers unusable is similar to a natural disaster with systems knocked offline, said Gartner’s MacDonald. That’s why businesses should consider natural disaster recovery plans for maintaining the resiliency of their operations.

One way to do that is to set up a “clean room,” or an environment isolated from other systems, to use to bring critical systems back online, according to Chirag Mehta, a cybersecurity analyst at Constellation Research.

Businesses should also hold tabletop exercises to simulate risk scenarios, including IT outages and potential cyber threats, Mehta said.

Companies that back up data regularly were likely less impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, according to Victor Zyamzin, chief business officer of security company Qrator Labs. “Another suggestion for companies, and we’ve been saying that again and again for decades, is that you should have some backup procedure applied, running and regularly tested,” he said.

Review vendor and insurance contracts

For any vendor with a significant impact on company operations , MacDonald said companies can review their contracts and look for clauses indicating the vendors must provide reliable and stable software.

“That’s where you may have an advantage to say, if an update causes an outage, is there a clause in the contract that would cover that?” he said.

If it doesn’t, tech leaders can aim to negotiate a discount serving as a form of compensation at renewal time, MacDonald added.

The outage also highlights the importance of insurance in providing companies with bottom-line protection against cyber risks, said Peter Halprin, a partner with law firm Haynes Boone focused on cyber insurance.

This coverage can include protection against business income losses, such as those associated with an outage, whether caused by the insured company or a service provider, Halprin said.

Weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the various platforms

The CrowdStrike update affected only devices running Microsoft Windows-based systems , prompting fresh questions over whether enterprises should rely on Windows computers.

CrowdStrike runs on Windows devices through access to the kernel, the part of an operating system containing a computer’s core functions. That’s not the same for Apple ’s Mac operating system and Linux, which don’t allow the same level of access, said Mehta.

Some businesses have converted to Chromebooks , simple laptops developed by Alphabet -owned Google that run on the Chrome operating system . “Not all of them require deeper access to things,” Mehta said. “What are you doing on your laptop that actually requires Windows?”