From project controls to AI-powered execution

Offshore wind capital projects are reaching a new stage of maturity. Turbines are bigger, more reliable, and deployed at industrial scale, and installation methods are increasingly standardized. Global installed capacity reached approximately 92.5 GW by the end of 2025. Demand continues to climb as electrification expands and data-center growth drives additional power consumption, with large corporate buyers contracting renewable energy at scale and increasing their energy offtake from offshore projects.

Beneath the capacity headlines, however, developers are grappling with a delivery problem that technology maturity has not solved. Only 13% of senior offshore wind professionals rate their recent projects as performing well on cost, while 36% rate them poorly, and 55% report a significant gap between the asset originally designed and the asset ultimately delivered. The root cause lies within the project delivery system: engineering rework and late design changes rank ahead of supply chain disruption as the leading driver of cost overruns.

Our recent report, Capital project excellence in Offshore Wind, explores where value is lost in project delivery, and how digital and AI-enabled approaches can help address these failures. The findings draw on a Capgemini Research Institute survey of 150 senior professionals working across the project lifecycle in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and wider Europe, fielded during April and May 2026. Respondents span the full delivery chain, and 78% have direct involvement in four or more capital projects over the past five years.

Inside the report

  • Seven execution failure patterns, measured by how widely they are observed, with the two most damaging identified. Late design freeze leads at 92%, and the report traces how a single upstream weakness travels through procurement, marine campaigns, and financing before it reaches a steering committee, by which point the cheapest options have usually disappeared.
  • The widest capability gap in the survey: decision speed and quality. Senior offshore wind professionals rank it as the most important capability for delivery success over the next five years, yet only 17% say their organization performs strongly on it today. The report explains why governance redesign alone is insufficient to close this capability gap and outlines what is required to improve decision-making at scale.
  • Where AI creates value, and where it does not. A map of AI capability against each failure pattern across origination, engineering, development, and construction, built on publicly documented deployments rather than generic technology claims, with the adoption barriers holding most organizations in pilots.
  • Five executive moves to shift from fragmented project controls to an integrated control and decision system, covering design maturity, ecosystem coordination, contractual data obligations, governance cadence, and board-level metrics.

Execution certainty is becoming part of the investment case, not only the delivery plan. The developers that industrialize information management, rather than those with the most sophisticated models, are likely to define the next cost benchmark in offshore wind. Capgemini helps put that operating model into practice, from common data definitions across contractors to the governance that decides where AI recommends and where a human approves.