Holistic solution for offshore wind farms From Hamburg to the World – interview with Thomas van der Laan, Project Manager Maritime Services & BoP at WINDEA Offshore GmbH & Co. KG

Our ‘From Hamburg to the World’ blog series profiles members of the EEHH network, focussing on their international activities, or activities that are of major importance for the international energy industry. This time, we take a look at WINDEA’s business activities, including on the US market. Based in Hamburg, WINDEA acts as a joint sales and product development company for offshore wind projects. By combining the various services of all its shareholders and partners, WINDEA is able to provide holistic logistics and supply solutions in connection with the construction and operation of offshore wind farms.

Hello Mr van der Laan, you’re responsible for selling maritime services at WINDEA. Tell us about yourself and your job.

In 2008, I completed a Masters of Industrial Engineering specialising in Shipping Logistics at the Business School of the traditional shipping university in my home town Leer, at the Fachhochschule Oldenburg/Ostfriesland/Wilhelmshaven. After various roles at shipping companies in northern Germany, including in the heavy cargo and marine research segment, I entered the offshore wind industry in 2012. Since 2019, I’ve been the global contact at WINDEA for all inquiries relating to offshore service vessels, port-based depots, marine coordination and underwater inspections.

As well as our main task, tender management, we’re also responsible for developing overseas markets and regularly attend international conferences and trade fairs. Various events in Poland, the US and the Netherlands, as well as the annual WindEurope Conference, are permanent fixtures in my calendar.

Offshore wind is WINDEA’s forte and is also reflected in your company name. What services does your company offer to advance offshore expansion and what is your vision for the future?

We primarily provide offshore service vessels (Crew Transfer Vessel/CTV and Service Operations Vessel/SOV) and port services. Our heavy cargo terminal in Eemshaven is a real flagship in the port sector. As well as our shareholders, we also now represent a number of partners and affiliated companies whose services are a meaningful addition to our portfolio. We have fantastic synergies in sales, as customers have a maximum of three contacts with us, who bring the right experts to the negotiating table, depending on their inquiry.

We focus on reducing interfaces for customers. This could be: a Schulte Group SOV that – manned by Buss maintenance technicians – sets off from a base port operated by Ems Maritime Offshore (EMO) for the wind farm, where it uses our partners’ autonomous diving robots, watercraft and drones to carry out on-site foundation and turbine inspections, as well as all the geophysical measurements, while NHC helicopters and EMO CTV implement the crew change – that’s my vision!

In practice, we mainly sell these services individually, because customers don’t buy such packages. But we’re currently working on a few projects that come very close to this.

Which projects are among your highlights and/or which WINDEA projects do you look back on with pride?

I’m proud of the development of the ‘VENTUSmarine’ Marine Coordination Centre at the EMO site in Emden, which has been providing maritime surveillance for many German wind farms in the North and Baltic Seas as a shared service since 2014. We’ve implemented a high safety standard here and have been offering customers stable, low prices for years, which we’re able to maintain by improving efficiency. The on-site coordinators undertake an enormous amount of work every day and are real multi-tasking machines!

My most recent highlight is cooperating with our US partners and concluding the initial CTV charter agreements in 2022. The effort involved in understanding this issue in such a complex market was enormous and we invested a huge number of man hours in preliminary work – but it was worth it in the end.

But the best is yet to come. While we’ve only been able to order one new ship against a long-term charter agreement in recent years, our shareholder, Schulte, decided to speculatively order two Commissioning Service Operation Vessels (CSOV) from ULSTEIN-Werft in Norway at the end of last year. The first of these will be delivered in May 2025 and our sales department is already in full swing, facing new challenges every day!

WINDEA also supports projects outside of Europe with its in-house expertise and knowledge, in the US for example, where it’s been active via a joint venture since 2019. How important is the US market for WINDEA and can you explain your business activities in more detail?

The US market is one of the most difficult, especially for shipping lines and ship owners. I probably don’t need to explain the Jones Act to anyone in our industry. That’s why it was important for us to first find a local partner who has the necessary US equity to finance, build and take a majority share in offshore special vessels. This partner is MidOcean Wind (MOW). Together, we developed vessels that meet the special US regulations and addressed specialist issues such as the correct crew levels, for example.

Are there other countries that play a role in WINDEA’s internationalisation strategy? And how do you view this development and the resulting business prospects for your company?

In the last four years, there have been fewer tenders for new projects in Germany, as you know. As a result, we’ve dealt with almost every country with wind energy expansion targets. This isn’t always easy. Even within the EU, there are local content requirements. And even if there are no rules, the cheapest bidder for labour-intensive services is always the one that has positioned its resources close to the place where they will be needed. Developing an overseas market almost always requires initially establishing a local presence and hiring staff. You have to look closely at where and when the density of business opportunities at a location is so great that it is worthwhile.

Naturally, our neighbouring countries, the Netherlands and Denmark, are the most obvious choice here, as we already have local offices, e.g. in Eemshaven and Esbjerg. For the future, we also regard Poland and the Baltic states as a region that will experience a construction peak from 2030. France is in a difficult situation geographically speaking, as wind farms are poorly clustered along the extensive coastline, involving lengthy transport routes. Brexit has also added some further obstacles to business development in the UK, where competition was already extremely fierce.

Of course, none of this affects the SOV sector, where we can provide our services almost anywhere in the world via the Schulte Group’s global site network. We’re also targeting countries like Korea and Japan.

We’re pleased that WINDEA was part of the German delegation at this year’s IPF as a co-exhibitor. How do you rate your trade fair attendance and how can we as a regional industry network better support medium-sized offshore companies like WINDEA with their international activities in future?

For us, IPF and the annual face-to-face meetings with our partners is the best opportunity for sharing ideas with our customers. We speak to most of them in advance and arrange appointments – often outside the exhibition hall. But this year’s set-up, with the joint stand and inclusion in the exhibitor listing, made us more visible. After the trade fair, we received a number of letters from people who were unable to meet us on the stand, but would like to get in touch.

Regarding support, the following comes to mind: something that often causes us difficulties when preparing overseas projects is a lack of knowledge of local working conditions, such as working time legislation and regulations on Sunday or night work – or in the case of the US, the issuing of visas. We can get help with this from the Chambers of Commerce, for example, but our questions are often very specialised. I’d definitely attend specialist presentations on this topic!