Just two years ago Shell CEO Ben van Beurden was bemoaning the lack of investment opportunities in renewables – how times have changed.

In a hectic last week for the Shell New Energies communications department, the low-carbon technology arm of the Anglo-Dutch oil supermajor put out no less than three announcements, all in the cause of its corporate energy transition.

Shell started on a near-literal high, tying up with Google parent company Alphabet to take the Makani ‘energy kite’– a technology that has been in fine-tuning as part of its Google ‘X’ programme for several years – into the skies in commercial numbers, starting with a first offshore unit being installed off Norway later this year.

The offshore wind theme recurred a day later as Shell, Innogy and floating wind outfit Stiesdal Offshore Technologies took a final investment decision on deploying a prototype of the TetraSpar concept, an innovative industrialisation-minded modular concept that will be assembled quayside in Norway as part of €18m ($20.3m) demonstrator project.

Then, as if to give physical weight to their investments in ‘futuristic’ technologies like floating and high-altitude wind, Shell revealed it had bought Germany battery pioneer Sonnen, a rival to Tesla that is best known for domestic storage systems but already active in large-scale projects to balance a renewables-heavy German grid.

Taken together, it would appear we are now a long way from van Beurden’s 2016 statement to an industry audience in Paris that “of the $30bn we invest each year, I cannot find a significant percentage to invest in [profitable] renewables projects, simply because they are not there”.

Renewables are winning the economic argument at Shell. Capital allocation for new energies in 2017 had been capped at $1bn-$2bn a year, in expectation that a clean-energy business unit with a focus on wind, solar and storage would account for $1bn in business by the end of the decade. But last year, the company doubled-up for a $4bn annual clean-energy spend from 2020 if initial forays proved “financially credible”.

Offshore wind – harnessed in a home-away-from-home for a petro-giant that has been operating subsea oil fields for many decades – will be at the heart of Shell’s change. Offshore wind has scale and scalability that matches up well with upstream offshore oil & gas megaprojects: capital investment and returns are of a recognisable size, and the engineering challenges of building energy infrastructure in harsh marine conditions are understood.

Shell’s experience in recent years with utility-scale offshore wind has been mixed. It won some and lost some in the Netherlands’ tenders for the Borssele zone wind farms and after a slow start off the US east coast, went large off Massachussets, New York and New Jersey.

It is also looking to bid big on Asia offshore. In China, Shell late last year joined France’s EDF, Norway’s Equinor and Denmark’s Orsted in trade meetings with Beijing navigating a point of energy into a market that is on the brink of a boom; and in Korea a few weeks ago Shell was a signatory on a consortium MoU that is targeting construction of a combined 1GW of floating wind power capacity off the island nation.

Whatever the pace of progress in Shell’s energy transition, the company can lead from the front from here, showing the rest of the global oil industry – and a few utilities – that there a cast-iron case for investing in offshore wind, derisking what may still be considered by some as a niche market, but clearly won’t be for much longer.

And let’s not forget, the timetable for change is not solely Shell’s to set. A coalition of environmental groups in the Netherlands said last week it will hand over a court summons on 5 April demanding the energy conglomerate abandon its current business model.

The Friends of the Earth-led group claims that its corporate strategy is “deliberately obstructing” efforts to keep global warming well below two degrees, as targeted by the Paris agreement, and that Shell should be compelled by the moral imperative of last year’s UN report, which underlines that world has 12 years to transform its energy system or face climate disaster.

Transition

Shell clean energy spree shows times are changing