Offshore wind planning matured around bottom-fixed foundations. When a monopile or jacket sits on the seabed, the geometry is fixed. Crane angles, vessel approach windows, and weather workability thresholds are constrained by known parameters. Simulation tools can model these with confidence: given a set of weather observations and a vessel specification, the planning model produces a schedule with predictable risk bounds.
Floating turbines are different in a way that matters for planning. The platform moves with the sea state. During installation, the dynamic behaviour of the mooring system interacts with wave environment and vessel motion. During O&M, technician access depends on platform response in real sea conditions — not on fixed-geometry workability criteria. The thresholds that govern whether an operation is safe and achievable are functions of physics that generic planning tools don't model.
The result is that floating wind projects are being planned with tools that don't understand what a floating turbine does in real sea states. Installation sequences are designed for vessels and weather windows that look workable on paper but prove marginal in practice. Contingency margins are set by analogy with bottom-fixed experience rather than by time-domain simulation of the actual operations.
When those margins prove insufficient — and they consistently do, across floating wind projects at every stage — the schedule impact is compounded by the fact that the project team didn't know they were marginal. There is no scenario model showing how close to the boundary a weather window was, or what the recovery sequence looks like when it closes early.
Floating wind has a 56 GW pipeline target for 2040. The projects that will execute against that target are not the ones with the most ambitious designs — they are the ones where planning infrastructure catches up to the physics of the platform. That means time-domain simulation that models mooring dynamics, platform response, and vessel interaction from the earliest planning stage, not after a schedule slip has already crystallised.
The planning-execution gap that runs through bottom-fixed offshore wind is larger and faster-moving in floating wind. Projects that close that gap early — keeping the analytical rigour of the simulation model alive through installation and O&M — are the ones that will execute on schedule. The others will keep slipping, and keep being surprised by it.
