The Celtic Sea is central to the UK’s offshore wind ambitions, playing a major role in delivering net zero while driving economic growth across Wales and the South West.
But beneath that ambition sits a problem the industry has yet to fully confront.
The seabed conditions are fundamentally different to those that offshore wind has been built on to date. The shallow overburden over bedrock combined with harsh metocean conditions, extreme loading requirements and the need to deliver projects at industrial scale create challenges that conventional approaches struggle to overcome.
And yet, many projects proceed on the assumption that they won’t.
Drag embedment anchors, driven piles and suction piles have served the industry well to date, but they are not technically viable at the scale required across large sections of the Celtic Sea. Continuing to rely on them doesn’t just create engineering challenges, it undermines the entire project economics. This is where the real risk lies.
If projects are modelled on solutions that cannot deliver the required performance, cost or scalability, then Final Investment Decision (FID) becomes increasingly difficult to achieve. Not because the ambition isn’t there, but because the foundations of the business case are flawed.
What’s required is not adaptation of existing methods, but adoption of approaches designed specifically for these conditions.
Subsea Micropiles represent one such approach. Engineered for shallow soils over bedrock and to withstand high loads in harsh environments, they offer a fundamentally different way of thinking about anchoring. By integrating geotechnical and geophysical data into a unified 3D ground model, projects can improve soil understanding while reducing Pre-FID survey costs. That same model can then inform anchor design and simulation, optimising steel weight, installation strategy and overall system performance, ultimately reducing construction costs and risk.
That shift matters. The projects that move forward will not be those that simply meet technical requirements, but those that align engineering reality with commercial viability.
This extends beyond floating wind. In fixed-bottom projects, replacing traditional pin piles with anchor-based systems that act as landing platforms for jackets can reduce reliance on large installation vessels, improve schedule control and increase flexibility. It challenges established practice, but so do the conditions in the Celtic Sea.
The Celtic Sea will not be unlocked by applying legacy solutions to a new problem. It will be unlocked by recognising that the problem has changed and responding accordingly. Until then, the risk is clear, projects will continue to be designed for conditions that don’t exist, using solutions that don’t work, in a market that cannot afford either. Geological conditions are setting the pace for offshore wind development going forward and will prevent many from reaching a final investment decision. Our opportunity and our ambition require change.