Expert Workshop on Securing Europe’s Wind Competitiveness
04 November 2025
ECFR and EIES organised a Chatham House Rule workshop on 8 October 2025 in Berlin with senior policymakers, representatives from the wind industry, grid operators and renewable energy experts to examine the challenges confronting the German and European wind industry and explore actionable policy tools to anchor wind in Europe’s broader competitiveness and security agenda.
Executive Summary
The European wind sector is at a critical juncture. Inputs from EIES' Against the Headwinds: Securing Europe's Wind Sector and ECFR’s Last Gasp: Securing Europe's Wind Industry from Dependence on China highlighted the dual challenges facing the industry. Internally, slow and fragmented permitting, complex regulatory frameworks, and insufficient grid infrastructure threaten the timely deployment of wind capacity. Externally, Europe remains heavily dependent on China for critical raw materials, components, and magnet production, which exposes the industry to risks of supply concentration, price volatility, cyberattacks, and geopolitical leverage.
The resilience and security of Europe’s energy infrastructure and the supporting supply chain come with costs. Yet, fragility, dependency, and inaction carry even greater economic consequences. Chinese wind turbine manufacturers have already taken over their domestic market, intensified competition in Europe and are making rapid headway into developing markets. This undermines European firms’ revenues and market shares abroad and distorts EU internal market dynamics. Targeted measures over the next 12–18 months will be decisive to secure Europe’s competitiveness, industrial resilience, and energy sovereignty.
Key Insights and Recommendations
Raw Materials
Europe remains highly dependent on China for rare earths and lacks domestic refining and magnet production capabilities. This exposes the European wind industry to the risk of Chinese export restrictions, market manipulation, and broader economic coercion.
Strategic European mining, processing and recycling projects for critical materials – integrated across the supply chain – should be encouraged through innovative public-private partnerships, including targeted financial support and investment incentives. R&D funding for recycling technologies and alternative materials should also be increased to reduce dependence on primary resources.
To enhance supply chain security, Europe should establish strategic partnerships with resource-rich and producing countries such as Australia, the US, Canada, Japan, India, Vietnam and Brazil. When supporting mining and refining projects abroad, Europe should continue to attract investments, promoting mutually beneficial partnerships and high environmental and social standards that Chinese competitors may not observe.
Components
Reshoring to Europe increases costs for manufacturers, developers and ultimately operators, while supplier diversification adds operational complexity. Yet, sourcing turbine control systems or similar parts from a limited number of suppliers – particularly in adversarial or unreliable nations – creates cybersecurity vulnerabilities and supply disruption risks.
Resilience criteria such as under the EU’s Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA) and upcoming legislative proposals should comprehensively cover both critical hardware and software components. Criteria should further be clear, achievable, aligned across the EU and established in dialogue with the industry to avoid administrative complexity and support European competitiveness. This may also call for the identification of blacklists and whitelists of components.
Targeted sourcing of less complex components such as towers and hubs from trusted partners, while advancing domestic manufacturing and maintaining in-house control over critical systems like turbine control units, could serve as a pragmatic approach. Europe should adopt EU-wide output-based incentives to scale up critical manufacturing and create technological and process efficiencies in the wind and grid sectors.
Regarding anti-competitive practices, Europe should leverage its trade-defence instruments and supply-chain diversification strategies to address uneven competition and overdependency on Chinese manufacturers.
Given China’s intensified domestic efforts to exclude European suppliers when sourcing ‘autonomous and controllable’ grid technologies, the reciprocity principle that guides Europe’s China policy should be extended to also tackle security and cyber risks of Chinese equipment used in Europe. The vetting of wind equipment over a certain size as mandated by Lithuania could serve as an EU-wide model.
Diversifying suppliers will not result in onshoring every step of the manufacturing process to the EU. Rather, the EU and partners with a domestic wind industry such as India should coordinate to diversify supply chains and address market distortions from subsidised products. This is essential for Europe to scale its wind industry and remain competitive.
Infrastructure
Grid congestion and insufficient long-term grid planning pose serious risks to wind energy deployment. Over 500 GW of wind capacity in Europe is awaiting grid connection due to slow, fragmented national-level planning and permitting. Europe should coordinate, streamline and harmonise permitting processes for wind projects and grid infrastructure to lower project costs, reduce development timelines, and improve overall energy security. Germany has emerged as a best‑practice example by rigorously implementing the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive and significantly shortening wind energy permitting timelines.
Aligning EU and national requirements on distance rules for wind turbines and certification processes for wind turbine towers is also needed to reduce administrative complexity and long permitting times.
The integration of offshore wind and other distributed energy resources increases grid management complexity, subsea cable vulnerabilities and cyber-risk exposure. This requires a “security by design” approach to enhance infrastructure monitoring and protection measures, build rapid repair capabilities and use vetted suppliers for hardware and software.