Written by James McCatherin, Business Development Partner, Offshore Wind Academy
For much of the past decade, Taiwan’s offshore wind industry has been defined by construction. The work that drew attention, and the milestones that made the news, involved foundations going into the seabed, installation vessels working on the horizon, cables being laid, turbines rising out of the water, and the first megawatts reaching the grid. That phase is now drawing to a close, not because the work is finished but because the balance of activity is shifting from building wind farms to operating them.
By 2030, Taiwan expects to have 10.9 GW of offshore wind installed, much of it concentrated off the Changhua coast, where Greater Changhua, Hai Long, and the Changfang and Xidao projects already form one of the densest clusters of offshore wind in Asia. The capacity now signed and under construction represents the final large wave of that build-out, and what it leaves behind is an operating fleet that has to be maintained for decades. By around 2027, roughly half of the capacity Taiwan intends to have running by 2030 will already be in the water and generating, and that share only grows from there.
Taiwan is thus approaching the point where the bulk of the industry’s work moves decisively from construction to operations and maintenance. That shift is easy to read as a quiet administrative handover, when in fact operations and maintenance is the phase in which the return on a multibillion-dollar fleet is earned or lost.
Where The Economics Are Decided
While O&M is easily mistaken for the quiet period that follows the hard work of construction, in practice it is where much of a project’s economic outcome is decided. Operations and maintenance accounts for roughly 20 to 30 percent of a wind farm’s lifetime cost and runs for the full operating life of the asset, which for modern turbines is 25 to 30 years. The lifetime return on the asset is won or lost gradually, across a long series of operating decisions.
Each of those decisions has to balance two pressures that rarely point in the same direction. The first is cost: the price of a vessel day, the choice to hold a spare part or do without it, the expense of an unplanned shutdown, and the cumulative effect of a maintenance strategy that is either efficient or wasteful when compounded over decades. Getting crews and parts out to turbines that sit tens of kilometers offshore, and doing it inside the narrow windows the weather allows, is among the largest and least forgiving costs in the entire operation, and the single most expensive outcome of all is a turbine standing idle while it waits for access or a repair. The second pressure is safety, because the people doing this work are offshore, often at height, on energized equipment, in weather that can change quickly. Managing cost without compromising the protection of people and assets is the central discipline of the operating phase, and it becomes more demanding, not less, as the fleet ages.
The Taiwan Strait: A Harder Operating Environment Than The North Sea
What sets Taiwan apart from the European experience is the environment it must work in. The Taiwan Strait is one of the strongest wind resources anywhere, comfortably ahead of the North Sea, which is both the attraction and the problem: the same energy that makes it so productive puts heavier loads on turbines, foundations, and cables than operators have faced in most European waters. Regular typhoons add a significant challenge, amplified by typhoon season coinciding with Taiwan’s already narrow window for safe offshore work, running from roughly April until the northeast monsoon sets in around October. Additionally, Taiwan sits on a highly active plate boundary and records hundreds of earthquakes a year over a seabed of soft sand and clay prone to liquefaction, all of which bears directly on foundations, cables, and the cost and availability of insurance. None of this rules out operating in Taiwan, but it stacks typhoons and earthquakes on top of an already unforgiving job and demands more experience than even the North Sea required.
Compressing 30 Years Into 10
Europe built its offshore wind industry over roughly three decades, beginning with the first farm at Vindeby in 1991, and the operating expertise its developers now hold, the institutional memory of what fails, when, and why, accumulated one project and one hard lesson at a time. Taiwan is attempting to cover the same ground in a single decade, having gone from two pilot turbines to one of the five largest offshore wind markets in the world in under ten years. This means far less time for the workforce, the supply chain, and the operating practices to mature before the fleet depends on them.
The silver lining in all of this is that Europe has already worked through these problems; Taiwan does not have to relearn them in real time. Take subsea cables, which cause a striking share of offshore wind’s operational losses: a single fault can leave an asset earning nothing for weeks while it waits on a repair, and the cost lands almost entirely in that downtime. Knowing how to watch for the early signs, prioritize inspections, and move quickly when something goes wrong is exactly the kind of operating judgment Europe built up over years of running wind farms, and it’s what separates a fault that costs days from one that costs months. That pattern, where the gap between a minor fault and a major loss comes down to operating judgment rather than equipment, repeats across the fleet, and it is the kind of judgment that is essential for protecting and optimizing the asset over the next two and a half decades.
Experience Must Be Handed Over In-Person
Taiwan’s harder constraint is a shortage of experience, not of workers. Technicians can be trained in a few years, but the judgment that comes from running wind farms through storms, failures, and the slow accumulation of things that go wrong cannot, and the local pool of it is thin. That kind of knowledge accumulates in people slowly; Europe took the better part of thirty years and a long list of expensive mistakes to build it up.
Taiwan’s own operators are blunt about the gap. Daniel Shih of Shinfox Far East has described how, in the early build-out, foreign developers came in, built the farms, and left, and “the critical know-how never stays.” Polin Chen, who runs the cable-laying firm Dong Fang Offshore 東方風能 (DFO), frames it as an ambition: with a dozen wind farms to build this decade, Taiwan has to own that knowledge itself.
Closing that gap is less about the volume of training than its kind. The experience is in Taiwan now, carried by the operators building and running the fleet, but it does not pass through technician courses or safety certification. The judgment to operate a wind farm rather than merely service it, to set a maintenance strategy, weigh cost against safety, and decide when to repair, when to replace, and when to wait, moves only from expert to expert, hands-on in the work itself, as the people who have made those calls for years work beside the people who will make them next.
Taiwan has already proven it can install offshore wind in some of the most difficult waters on earth. Whether it can run that fleet well for the next 25 years will depend on if it builds a workforce capable of operating it effectively.
Sources: MOEA Energy Administration; TOWIA; TWTGA; GWEC Global Offshore Wind Report; 4C Offshore; ORE Catapult; ABPmer; Pinsent Masons; Rest of World.
James McCatherin is a Business Development Partner with Offshore Wind Academy, with 5 years of Offshore Wind Industry experience across the APAC region. His areas of expertise include permitting and policy, markets, and stakeholder engagement.