Only once governments have provided the regulatory certainty and hard capacity targets that utilities, developers and financiers need to base investments on, he says, will we find out.

Thirty-five years of consulting and engineering has given the GL Garrad Hassan chairman and European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) president a level view of the industry at a time when installation targets in the offshore sector’s two biggest construction zones — the UK and Germany — have continued to slip, and a major European utility, SSE, is making confidence-denting delays to its project investment plans.

If