Statistics & publications

GWEC and GWO have published the report Powering the Future: Global Offshore Wind Workforce Outlook 2020-2024 as the first deliverable of the partnership between the two global associations.

The report provides a qualitative analysis of the workforce training needs required to deliver 31GW of forecast installations in six target markets: North America, China (Mainland), Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam,and South Korea.

The offshore wind industry will need 78,000 GWO-trained workers to fulfill 2020-2024 market forecasts in these six target markets, or 2.5 persons per MW per project.

Key bottlenecks for training include lack of training centres, standard familiarity and risk of training standards being perceived as “imposed”.

Having a trained workforce based on GWO standards is necessary to ensure health and safety of workers, secure the long-term sustainability of the sector, create thousands of local jobs and power the global energy transition.

The impacts of COVID-19 on both workforce and turbine supply chain is yet to be fully quantified, although GWEC Market Intelligence expects there to be minor impacts for the markets highlighted in the report, and GWO has begun rolling at digital training platforms to continue training the workforce during the crisis.

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