Siemens Gamesa Warns Europe, Shell Sells Offshore Wind

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Welcome to Uptime News Flash, Industry News, Lightning Fast. Your host, Allen Hall, shares the renewable industry news you may have missed.

**Allen Hall** (0:15)
Happy Monday, everyone. The wind industry got a warning last week, and it came from the top. Siemens Gamesa, the world's largest maker of offshore wind turbines says governments in Europe may be running out of time. The company's chief executive sounded the alarm last Thursday. Europe is currently 40 gigawatts short of its 120 gigawatts offshore wind target by 2030 16 gigawatts of projects in Germany alone are at risk of delay, tangled up in lengthy permitting and grid connection backlogs. The plants are running full today, but with new orders not coming soon, factories could go dark for contracts starting in about 2028
It's not an existential threat, said Siemens Gamesa chief Vinod Philip, but it could become one.
He's offshore to predicting shutdowns, but he said the company will likely have to downsize resources if governments fail to act quickly. Europe's offshore supply chain has already committed 14 billion euros to meet the 2030 targets. That's roughly 16 billion dollars with no guarantee that the orders will follow. Meanwhile, one of the world's biggest oil companies is quietly walking away from wind. Shell is preparing to sell its offshore wind farms in a deal that could fetch more than one billion dollars. The company has hired advisors to run the process, which could launch before the year is out with the sale expected sometime in 2027 Shell once dreamed of becoming the world's largest electricity producer. That vision died when its current CEO took over in 2023 and shifted the focus back to fossil fuels and shareholder returns. Since then, Shell has been unwinding its green power portfolio piece by piece. It sold its European onshore wind renewables arm. It sold Indian renewable company Sprng Energy, which it had bought just years earlier for 1.55 billion dollars. And it walked away from planned offshore wind farms in Scotland. When this latest sale closes, Shell will have little wind left in its portfolio.
But where one door closes, another one opens. And up in the northeast corner of Maine in the US., a region that has sat on one of the best wind resources in the country for years, a long-awaited breakthrough may finally be at hand. The Maine Public Utilities Commission is closing its latest round of bidding for wind and solar generation in Aroostok County, plus new transmission lines needed to move that power south to the rest of New England. The target, at least 1200 megawatts, enough power for hundreds of thousands of homes. Maine is not going alone this time. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont are sharing the cost of the new transmission infrastructure.
The previous attempt in 2021 fell apart. Costs rose, deals could not be finalized, and landowners fought to propose 140-mile power line. But this time, officials say things are different. The Multistate Partnership changes the math, and Northern Maine's wind resource has not gone anywhere. Dozens of energy companies have signed up to compete, from local developers to major multinationals. If everything goes to plan, the best-case scenario puts new turbines spinning in the 2030s. And half a world away, Egypt is making a major investment to keep pace with its own renewable ambitions. The Egyptian Prime Minister last week witnessed the signing of a financial agreement worth 60 billion Egyptian pounds earmarked for the National Electricity Transmission Network. That might even go towards upgrading the grid so it can absorb the solar and wind power Egypt plans to add in the coming years. The target, 45% of national electricity from renewable sources by 2028 The electricity minister said modernizing the grid is a quote continuous and evolving process and ain't that the truth. And the implementation timelines are being compressed to meet that 2028 deadline.
So wind is shifting and the question is who is going to move along with it?
And that's the state of the wind industry for the 15th of June, 2026 Join us for The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.