The fact they didn’t, or couldn’t, is a red flag to the limits of intermittent power. Another is cost. As the world enters another climate-action season, with the upcoming UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting about to take place at Baku in Azerbaijan this month, it is time to take stock.

Crucial to the analysis must be the fact new, much-hyped technologies are proving difficult to scale. Labor is reshaping its bets towards more solar and backup batteries. Onshore wind will be a big part of the mix but, like new transmission lines to get the power to market, land-hungry wind is fraught with community risk.

More gas has rightly become a bipartisan project because it works. Hydrogen has been pushed further into the future, if ever. And offshore wind is following the same trajectory as hydrogen.

Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is trying to sound positive but seeding doubts that a new 2035 target can be set before the election.

Ironically, Climate Change Authority chairman Matt Kean decries the fact nuclear won’t work before 2035 and rejects the technology as a pet project for “delay mongers” and internet chat rooms.

The reality is quite different. Sure, there are significant issues surrounding the politics, timing and cost of nuclear, but they are problems shared by favoured technologies such as hydrogen and offshore wind. The pre-Albanese approach of government to be technology agnostic, to see what works, is looking prophetic. Cautionary tales abound.

In the world of renewable energy that hankers for the status of energy superpower, bigger is better. And it doesn’t get much bigger than offshore wind. Fixed and floating, offshore wind is being sold as a new paradigm that will get around many of the obstacles found onshore, with better, more reliable wind availability and speeds, and fewer neighbours to annoy. The trade-off is highly complex engineering, new environmental considerations and harsh operating conditions.

Despite the big ambitions, reality is starting to bite. Costs are proving to be higher than expected and reliability less than desired. Increasingly, the endgame globally is becoming a contest between offshore wind and nuclear. In a wake-up call for Australian politicians, one of the world’s biggest energy technology companies, GE, says the cost of offshore wind must be compared with new nuclear rather than onshore wind or solar.

The CSIRO puts floating offshore wind near the top of its cost curve. So does the US Department of Energy. In Australia, the federal government is putting a lot of faith in offshore wind getting up to scale. But, as with hydrogen, when the numbers are properly crunched the risk remains that it will be an industry that may look good on paper but not where it really matters: on the power bill.

It is all part of the arms race in the world of emissions-free energy. The prize is to capture an outsized share of the trillions of dollars being spent as the world looks for ways to satisfy its growing thirst for carbon dioxide emissions-free power.

When Andy Evans, a pioneer in Australia’s push to join the still nascent offshore wind industry, started out in 2012, he says wind turbines were considered world leading at 4 or 5 megawatts in size. Today they are the size of the Eiffel Tower, with blade spans bigger that three commercial jetliners laid side-by-side.

Each turbine is rated to produce 20MW, with a single turn of the giant blades producing enough electricity to power an average home for 24 hours. The growth in size is a stretch for efficiency to justify the high capital costs involved, but as wind-tower designs push the envelope they are bumping up against the limits of physics and engineering, as well as economic reality and the ability of governments and consumers to pay.

After a year from hell financially, global industry leaders say the offshore wind business model is broken. There is a shake-up under way but no let-up in ambition for offshore wind to take an increasing share of future power production, including in Australia.

The Albanese government has released large offshore wind zones in Victoria, NSW, Tasmania and Western Australia to kickstart what will be a decades-long program to put Australia into the offshore wind race.

Bowen says “offshore wind represents a huge opportunity for regional Australia, providing reliable renewables to power homes and heavy industry while creating highly skilled and well-paid jobs now and into the future”.

It is a continuation of a process that began under consecutive Coalition administrations. It is also an almost unfathomably ambitious endeavour, as far removed from putting solar panels on the rooftop as anyone could imagine. It is a big-engineering, high-skill, high-employment gamble that will require all the fabrication and offshore maritime skills the nation can muster. In a country that lives around the coastal fringe the industry must, by necessity, fight hard to convince decision-makers and local communities it is a safe and worthwhile bet.

There is ongoing debate about the impact that offshore wind farms will have on the environment. This includes sound impacts, ship strikes, underwater entanglement and any threat posed to migratory birds.

All such projects must be assessed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 including construction, operation and decommissioning of wind turbines, cables, substations and associated infrastructure.

But dead whales are not the only things that have been washing up on the beaches on the US Atlantic coast to embarrass the wind industry. The Vineyard Wind project, the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm to be built in the US, located roughly 24km off the coast of Massachusetts, suffered a setback on July 13 after a blade from one of its massive 13MW Haliade-X turbines crumpled, leaving debris in the water and ending up on Nantucket beaches. Embarrassed, the company sent trained individuals to walk the southern-facing beaches to pick it up.

Following the failure, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement issued a suspension order directing Vineyard Wind to halt any power-production operations or new construction activity.

Then, in August, the company suffered a blade failure at the site of what will be the world’s largest offshore wind farm, the first phase of the massive 3.6GW Dogger Bank project in the North Sea, off the coast of Britain. The incident was the second blade failure for Dogger Bank A, after an incident at the beginning of May. Dogger Bank sits about 130km off the coast of Yorkshire and will occupy an area almost as large as Greater London. When completed it will comprise 277 offshore turbines capable of producing enough energy to power the equivalent of six million British homes annually.

Blade failures and cost increases have left GE questioning the timing and future economics of offshore wind.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on September 24, GE Vernova chief executive Scott Strazik said “for the world to ultimately nurture offshore wind we are going to have to think of offshore wind relative to the pricing for a new nuclear plant or carbon capture and gas”.

“As we get into the next decade, as the renewables penetration rate gets higher and the amount of carbon electricity still getting less and less, the last mile is going to be more expensive for us to get to a zero-carbon world,” Strazik says. “I am very confident offshore wind can price relative to those comparison points and be competitive.

“Today it’s been comped against the wrong neighbourhood. It is never going to be economically competitive with onshore wind and solar but it will be competitive with new nuclear or carbon capture and gas, and if the world thinks about it that way I think, offshore wind is going to play a very important part in the energy transition.”

GE has been laying off workers in its offshore wind division and is not taking orders. “That’s partly because the industry is sick,” says Strazik. GE is increasingly turning its attention to nuclear.

“I do think in the early 2030s this (nuclear) will start to scale,” Strazik told the WSJ. “We’re going to be adding gigawatts upon gigawatts of nuclear capacity every year. I’m highly confident in the 2030s this is going to be a very material part of the equation for us.”

Meanwhile, Macquarie, the Australian investment bank that has taken a big forward position in the green transition globally, reportedly has engaged advisers for a potential sale of its subsidiary Corio Generation, one of the largest offshore-wind developers.

Google energy chief Enrique Frances told the WindEnergy Hamburg conference last month that rising power prices from offshore wind farms were pushing industrials to look elsewhere to meet their corporate demands. Big tech, with a high demand for energy to power artificial intelligence, increasingly is putting its bets on nuclear. BP is looking for an exit from offshore wind.

Analysis by RealClearEnergy shows wind-turbine manufacturers have faced serious financial challenges in the past three years, even with rising sales.

The stock of Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, the largest supplier, rose only 7 per cent across the past 16 years and its stock price has fallen 58 per cent from its high in 2021.

Other major wind suppliers also have been poor investments for shareholders. The stock of Siemens Gamesa, the No.2 turbine-maker, is down 65 per cent since a peak in 2021. Gamesa reported a loss of €4.4bn in 2023 and received a €7.5bn bailout from the German government that same year. Other top wind suppliers suffered major stock price declines since 2021, including Goldwind of China (down 77 per cent) and Nordex of Germany (down 36 per cent).

The big picture for offshore wind is of a new industry in the throes of technological evolution, from fixed to floating technology, that offers a high relative-cost option for intermittent power generation. The appraisal by insurance giant Allianz is that spiralling costs have halted major wind projects in recent months and the industry is afflicted by inflation, capital expenses, rising interest rates and geopolitical instability. In a review of the sector last year, Allianz said the costs of materials and vessel hire had risen with inflation and because of ever-larger wind turbines. Supply-chain bottlenecks, lengthy permit procedures and delays to grid connections are also bringing pressure to bear.

Allianz says a global rollout of offshore wind will require the expansion of manufacturing footprint, port facilities and infrastructure. Supply-chain diversification is likely to become a priority to strengthen local supply chains and avoid over-reliance on certain markets, particularly China, which produces about 60 per cent of onshore and offshore nacelles (the heart of a turbine that houses key mechanical and electrical equipment) and dominates the supply of gearboxes, generators, castings, towers and flanges.

For offshore wind enthusiasts such as Evans, this is where the challenge and opportunity lies. Evans has exposure to projects with both fixed and floating technologies. He was a co-founder of the Star of the South project in Victoria that, all going well, hopes to have its first fixed turbines in the water in 2028. It is a critical piece in the Victorian government’s ambitious carbon reduction plans.

“The Victorian target is really built around our project,” says Evans. A fixed-turbine project in shallow waters relatively close to shore, the Star of the South involves better known technologies but is still a risk. Proposed to sit at least 10km off the Gippsland coast, Star of the South has the potential to generate up to 2.2GW of new capacity – that’s enough to power around 1.2 million homes.

Charles Rattray, chief executive of the Star of the South project developer, Southerly Ten, says offshore wind projects “are not for the faint-hearted”.

“You have got to be, as an investor, courageous, government needs to be courageous and if we can do that we can get there,” he says. “We are so close to getting this industry off the ground in Australia. Investors are ready, licence holders are ready, government is doing enormous amounts of work and the supply chain will line up when we are ready to go.”

Rattray says the value proposition for Victoria is that offshore wind typically blows when other sources are fading or not available.

“Wind is a variable resource, there are good days and bad days, good years and bad years,” he says. “But what we see on our project is we are a much more stable generation profile.”

To get there, however, Star of the South must face the same cost pressures that beset the industry everywhere. Rattray says inflationary pressures are not restricted to offshore wind. And the project uses fixed-platform technology, which is cheaper and more mature. But it comes with other problems. “Victoria and Gippsland is a very good place for offshore wind,” Rattray says. “Good conditions, seabed conditions that are excellent for foundations, we believe the environmental risks are manageable.”

The two big risks exercising the project developers’ minds are water noise and its potential impact on marine life and bird strikes.

“We have got more than 50,000 data points in Bass Strait to understand the ecosystem,” Rattray says. “We have a good handle on where we can remove risks and hazards.”

Ultimately it will come down to economics and competitive options. The industry is banking on government stepping in to take the risk through “contract for difference” arrangements, where developments are guaranteed a minimum price. Experience overseas has been for projects to bid low and cancel or come back for more as development costs increase.

Victoria has a lot riding on the industry being successful, but that does not mean it will be the best possible deal for taxpayers.

“I think sometimes people miss the ‘build it and they will come’ type analogy,” Rattray says. “When we have a secure investible industry, people will start to line up.”

The new horizon for Evans is the Novocastrian project, which has been given permission to investigate putting 120 floating turbines off the coast of Newcastle in NSW. Novocastrian Offshore Wind Farm, being developed by Norwegian energy giant Equinor and Oceanex Energy, was the only project being offered a licence in the Hunter zone. Plans by the companies to evaluate a similar project off the Illawarra coast have been scrapped. Equinor says it will focus on the Hunter project.

A company spokesperson was quoted as saying the company “carefully evaluated risk factors that are currently impacting the global industry and conducted project-specific and site-specific assessments” to divine where capital and technical talent should be sent. It is counter to the ambitions of those such as Evans who believe economies of scale will be needed to create what would be a new industrial maritime industry.

Floating wind farms are too early to price with confidence, but if offshore wind is to become a big part of the renewable energy transition globally it will have to become the standard. That is because fixed turbines are limited to ocean depths of less than 60m, areas that are also subject to greater environmental sensitivity and competing use. The CSIRO GenCost report says it will be 2050 before the cost of floating offshore wind falls below that of fixed offshore wind.

“This result could be plausible if we consider that, in this scenario and time period, most readily accessible fixed offshore wind sites adjacent to the highest demand countries may already be claimed, shifting the focus of global manufacturing to supplying floating offshore wind technology,” the CSIRO says. In other words, parity costing relies on fixed options becoming more expensive and difficult to secure.

Evans, who has filmed a global documentary on offshore wind, says offshore wind should be seen as large marine infrastructure as much as renewables: “We get the benefits of renewables later on but a lot of the skills sets are inherited from offshore oil and gas. We have deep knowledge in the offshore oil and gas sectors because there has been so much investment for years.” On costs and reliability, he says there will be continual engineering improvements.

Certainly, there is a lot of water to flow under the bridge between now and when the first offshore wind-turbine blades begin to spin, but experience to date indicates offshore wind is likely to remain a high-cost option, and one that will still require solutions for when the wind refuses to blow.

The newest 15MW turbines are about 260m tall with blades that are up to 115m long. To give you an idea of how big that is, the Sydney Tower is 309m tall.