The Global Wind Energy Council’s most recent Africa pipeline tracker counts more than 100 gigawatts of offshore wind projects in some stage of development across the continent — from South Africa’s Renewable Energy Offshore Wind Development Programme to Mauritania’s Atlantic corridor, Senegal’s northern coast, Egypt’s Mediterranean and Red Sea zones, and Morocco’s Atlantic shelf. It is a pipeline that, on paper, rivals the North Sea.
The installed total across all of Africa is zero megawatts. Not a pilot. Not a demonstration array. Zero.
The gap between announcement and commission is not a temporary construction delay or a post-COVID supply chain disruption. It reflects structural failures across multiple dimensions simultaneously: regulatory frameworks that do not exist, ports that cannot handle the equipment, vessels that are not available at any viable price, and a cost economics problem that makes African offshore wind uncompetitive against the solar resources available in the same countries.
What makes the situation analytically interesting — and strategically urgent — is that offshore wind’s absence is not cost-neutral. Several African countries are designing green hydrogen export strategies around offshore wind as the power source. South Africa’s national energy plan incorporates offshore wind as a significant capacity contributor for the 2030s. If the barriers are not addressed systematically, those plans will fail on delivery — not for want of ambition, but for want of basic regulatory infrastructure.
The Pipeline Illusion
Announced projects have a way of persisting in databases long after the conditions that made them plausible have changed. Africa’s offshore wind pipeline is, in aggregate, a collection of prospecting applications, memoranda of understanding, prefeasibility studies, and ministerial announcements — at various stages of decomposition.
Of the roughly 100GW in headline figures, industry consultants who have examined the pipeline in detail place only a small fraction — typically 5 to 8 percent — in any stage that could credibly lead to a final investment decision within the current decade. The vast majority are what developers call “options on options”: site reservations and framework agreements that give developers preferential access to a zone but require no capital deployment and carry no penalty for non-execution.
The structure of these agreements matters because it means the pipeline is simultaneously enormous and largely fictitious. Governments cite the aggregate figure as evidence of investor interest. Developers hold the options at low cost to maintain optionality. Finance has not followed either party’s announcements.
IRENA’s Africa offshore wind assessment, updated in 2025, noted that despite the headline pipeline, Africa had attracted less than 0.5 percent of global offshore wind investment flows in the preceding five years. The continent’s share of global total offshore wind capacity is expected to remain below 1 percent through 2030 even under optimistic scenarios.
South Africa’s ROWDP: Real Policy, Immature Execution
South Africa’s Renewable Energy Offshore Wind Development Programme is Africa’s most advanced offshore wind regulatory initiative. Launched in earnest in 2023 following wind resource mapping off the Western Cape and Eastern Cape coastlines, ROWDP established a dedicated policy framework for offshore wind development — something most African countries still lack entirely.
The framework is real. It has identified designated development zones, initiated environmental impact assessment procedures, and published a competitive procurement structure modelled on the country’s established onshore REIPPP. South Africa has, in other words, done the regulatory groundwork that most African countries have not.
What it has not done is move from framework to procurement. The first ROWDP bid window, originally expected in late 2025, has been delayed pending resolution of several unresolved regulatory questions: the marine spatial planning framework is incomplete, the grid connection approach for offshore generation is not finalised, and Eskom’s transmission division has not published indicative connection costs for offshore landing points along the Western Cape coast.
The delay is not a scandal — it reflects the genuine complexity of developing a new energy sector from scratch in a country that has never built an offshore wind turbine. What it does illustrate is the distance between having a policy intent and having an operational procurement mechanism. That distance, in South Africa’s case, is measured in years. In countries with less developed energy regulatory institutions, it is measured in decades.
The Xlinks Lesson
No African offshore wind project has attracted more international attention — or been more instructive in its difficulties — than Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project. Conceived as a 10.5GW hybrid wind and solar facility on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, connected to Great Britain via a 3,800-kilometre subsea high-voltage direct current cable, Xlinks was positioned as simultaneously Africa’s largest renewable energy project and a solution to the United Kingdom’s intermittency problem.
The project’s financial model never closed. Despite years of development, significant consultancy expenditure, and high-profile political endorsements from both the Moroccan government and UK ministers, Xlinks was unable to secure the anchor offtake agreement from the UK government that the project’s economics required. The UK Contracts for Difference auction mechanism was not designed to accommodate a cross-border subsea import of this scale, and creating a bespoke framework for a single project proved politically and administratively impractical.
Xlinks is not dead — the developer continues to pursue the project — but it has effectively stalled at the point where conceptual viability met institutional reality. The lesson for African offshore wind development is clear: projects that depend on regulatory innovation in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously face compounding risk. The more novel the structure, the longer the development timeline, and the more dependent the project becomes on political continuity that African energy markets have historically not provided.
The Cost Problem No One Wants to Discuss
Offshore wind’s core economic challenge in Africa is the same one that constrains its deployment in all emerging markets: it is simply more expensive than the alternatives, and in most African countries the alternative is not coal or gas but solar.
The levelised cost of electricity from offshore wind in African conditions — accounting for installation vessel mobilisation costs, the absence of local supply chain, and the risk premium applied to pioneer projects — currently runs between $90 and $140 per megawatt-hour in most modelled scenarios. Utility-scale solar in South Africa is commissioning at $30 to $45 per megawatt-hour on a commercial basis. Solar in Egypt and Morocco is below $25 per megawatt-hour in competitive tendering.
The LCOE gap is not a temporary phenomenon attributable to the absence of a local supply chain. Even with a mature installation industry, African offshore wind would be more expensive than solar in most countries where both resources are available. Offshore wind’s primary competitive advantage — consistent generation through the night and across seasons — has commercial value, but that value is reflected in capacity market payments and grid balancing services that most African power markets do not have mechanisms to price.
The one context in which offshore wind’s economics are more compelling is green hydrogen export. Hydrogen electrolysis requires continuous power at high load factors to be economically viable, and offshore wind’s higher capacity factor relative to solar gives it a genuine advantage in that application. Mauritania’s Aman project — a proposed 30GW green hydrogen facility combining wind and solar — is the clearest African example of a design architecture in which offshore wind’s economics can be made to work, albeit only because the project is sized at a scale that captures installation efficiencies unavailable to smaller developments.
The problem is that Aman, like every other African green hydrogen megaproject, has not reached final investment decision. The hydrogen export market it depends on does not yet exist at the price point and volume that the projects require. The offshore wind component of a non-existent hydrogen market is, commercially speaking, a second-order absence.
No Ports. No Vessels. No Supply Chain.
Offshore wind turbines are among the largest industrial structures ever built. A single modern foundation, blade set, and nacelle assembly weighs thousands of tonnes. Installing them at sea requires specialised jack-up vessels — self-elevating platforms that can position themselves precisely in open water and handle components of extraordinary size. There are approximately thirty such vessels in global operation. None are based in Africa. None are configured for African port specifications.
The port infrastructure problem is less visible than the vessel problem but equally severe. Offshore wind installation and operations-and-maintenance logistics require quayside access with very high load-bearing capacity, deep draught berths, and large laydown areas for staging components. South Africa’s major commercial ports — Durban, Cape Town, Richards Bay — have none of these capabilities configured for offshore wind. Retrofitting a major port for offshore wind logistics is a multi-year, multi-billion-rand infrastructure project that has not been initiated.
The supply chain question goes further still. Cables, foundations, transition pieces, and the specialised substations required for offshore wind transmission all need to be manufactured, tested, and transported. Africa has no offshore wind manufacturing base. Everything required for the first African offshore wind project will be imported — almost certainly from Europe or China — adding cost, logistical complexity, and foreign exchange exposure to projects whose economics are already marginal.
Developers who have seriously studied African offshore wind development privately estimate that the first project will cost roughly forty to sixty percent more than an equivalent project in the North Sea, simply due to these infrastructure absences. That premium is not an argument for inaction — supply chains develop in response to demand — but it is an argument for honesty about the capital required and the timelines realistic for early-mover projects.
Regulatory Immaturity Across the Continent
South Africa, with its ROWDP framework, is the exception. Across most of the African countries with significant offshore wind resources, dedicated regulatory frameworks for offshore wind development do not exist.
Morocco’s offshore wind ambitions are real — the country has approved frameworks for export-oriented green projects including offshore generation — but the detailed licensing and grid connection regulations specific to offshore wind have not been published. Egypt’s energy ministry has signalled interest in offshore wind for the Red Sea and Mediterranean zones, but its regulatory focus has been overwhelmingly on onshore solar and wind where the economics are more straightforward.
Senegal and Mauritania face an additional structural challenge: their offshore economic zones overlap with active hydrocarbon extraction operations, and the regulatory regimes governing those zones were designed for oil and gas, not for fixed or floating wind structures. The legal question of how an offshore wind turbine interacts with a petroleum exploration block in the same zone has not been tested in any African jurisdiction.
The regulatory gap is not merely administrative. Offshore wind development requires marine spatial planning, environmental impact assessment frameworks for marine and coastal ecosystems, transmission planning for grid connection from offshore to onshore, and financial security requirements for decommissioning — typically forty-plus years after construction. Building all of these simultaneously, while also running a competitive procurement for the first project, is not impossible. It is the sequence every North Sea market went through between the 1990s and 2010s. But it takes time, institutional capacity, and political continuity — none of which African energy ministries have in surplus.
What Would Actually Move the Needle
The path to Africa’s first commissioned offshore wind project runs through a narrower set of interventions than the breadth of the barriers might suggest. Three changes would do most of the work.
First, regulatory consolidation in one or two anchor markets. South Africa completing its first ROWDP bid window — even at a modest initial scale of 1 to 2GW — would establish African offshore wind’s commercial reality in a way that a hundred pipeline announcements have not. It would create a reference project, a reference regulatory framework, and a reference cost structure that the rest of the continent could adopt and adapt. The delay in the first ROWDP bid window is therefore not a South African problem; it is a continental one.
Second, dedicated DFI concessional capital for infrastructure enablement rather than project finance. The World Bank, AfDB, and European development banks have collectively committed billions to African renewable energy project finance. Very little of that capital has gone to the enabling infrastructure — port retrofitting, vessel mobilisation support, grid connection engineering — without which offshore wind projects cannot be built regardless of how many are approved. Blended finance instruments specifically designed for offshore wind enabling infrastructure would represent more catalytic capital than the equivalent amount deployed as project finance.
Third, honest recalibration of timelines in national energy plans. South Africa’s Integrated Resource Plan includes offshore wind capacity from the mid-2030s. That timeline is achievable — but only if ROWDP procurement begins in the near term, which requires resolving the current regulatory outstanding items. Countries whose national energy plans include offshore wind capacity before 2035 without an operational procurement framework are writing fiction. Treating that fiction as planning creates downstream problems when generation targets are missed and the reasons are entirely predictable.
Africa’s offshore wind potential is real. The Atlantic coast of Mauritania has some of the best wind resources on Earth. South Africa’s Southern Ocean exposure gives it capacity factors that North Sea developers would envy. Morocco’s combination of wind, solar, and geographic proximity to European energy markets is genuinely unique. The 100GW pipeline is not invented.
But a pipeline is not a power station. The distance between Africa’s offshore wind potential and Africa’s offshore wind reality is not primarily a question of resources or investor interest. It is a question of whether the regulatory, infrastructure, and financing systems required to translate potential into commissioned capacity can be built fast enough to matter — before the energy plans that depend on offshore wind are written off as yet more aspirational targets that Africa announced and did not deliver.
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