Sub-system
In an offshore wind project the turbine is often not the largest cost. Foundations, installation vessels, subsea cables and the offshore substation frequently exceed it — and the vessels that can install a modern turbine are scarce enough to set project schedules.
In one sentence
Offshore wind foundations are the structures that support turbines at sea — driven monopiles, welded jackets, or moored floating platforms — installed by specialised vessels along with the cables connecting them to shore.
In shallow water a monopile — a very large steel tube driven into the seabed — is the standard and cheapest solution. As water deepens, jacket structures take over, and beyond roughly sixty metres fixed foundations stop being economic and floating platforms become the only option.
Floating designs change the industry's addressable geography completely, because most of the world's offshore wind resource is in water too deep for fixed foundations. They also change the construction model: a floating turbine can be assembled at quayside and towed out, avoiding the offshore heavy-lift operations that dominate fixed-foundation costs.
Split by what a company actually sells: a fabricated steel structure, a floating platform system, or vessel time.
Installing a modern turbine requires a jack-up vessel with cranes that reach high enough and legs long enough for the water depth. Turbines have grown faster than the fleet has, so the number of vessels capable of installing the largest machines is small, they are booked years ahead, and their availability sets project timelines.
Each turbine connects to others by inter-array cable, and the array connects to shore by export cable — high-voltage, armoured, and manufactured in continuous lengths by a small number of factories. Cable supply and the vessels that lay and bury them have been a repeated source of project delay, and cable faults are among the most expensive failures in an offshore wind farm.
Fixed foundations become uneconomic beyond roughly sixty metres of water, which excludes most of the coastline off many countries. Floating platforms, moored rather than fixed, open those areas. The engineering problems are mooring systems, dynamic cables that flex with the platform, and port infrastructure able to assemble the units.
1 of these is marked as a chokepoint: a handful of qualified suppliers, a multi-year lead time, or a single geography.
Continuous-length high-voltage submarine cable is made in few factories, and capacity has repeatedly been oversubscribed.
High-voltage cableMarshalling turbines requires ports with sufficient load-bearing quays and laydown area, which few have.
A project exists only once a lease area has been awarded and consented, and those rounds run to a government's timetable rather than a developer's.
Every company named on a step below this page, ordered by how many of those steps it appears at. Compiled from the pages themselves rather than written separately, so the two cannot disagree. Not a ranking and not a recommendation.
9 more companies appear at a single step each; they are named on the pages for those steps.
Whether the installation vessel fleet grows enough to keep pace with turbine size.
Whether floating projects move from demonstration to commercial scale.
Whether subsea cable capacity expands to match the transmission being planned.
Each page explains one technology in plain language, states what it depends on, and names companies by what they supply at that step. Company roles are described qualitatively and deliberately carry no market shares, revenue figures or rankings — those change faster than an explainer can, and a stale number is worse than none. Ticker links point at company pages on this site and are provided for reference only.
Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast. A company named on a page about a technology is not thereby a good investment, and the chokepoints described are structural facts about supply chains rather than predictions about prices. Technology moves; where a page describes something as unresolved or in development, that was true when it was written.
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