If you have followed offshore wind in the US over the past year, you mostly know it as a list of things getting stopped. Stop-work orders, suspended leases, lawsuits, and a federal government that has lately been paying some developers to abandon projects that were already under construction. It has been a strange stretch for an industry that, not long ago, looked like it was about to take off along the East Coast.<\/p>\n
Across the Atlantic, the same basic machine has been having a very different year. In February, crews working off the Yorkshire coast raised the last turbine on the first phase of Dogger Bank, the project that will eventually be the largest offshore wind farm on the planet. The milestone is real. It also comes with a footnote most headlines skip: this was phase one of three, and the finished, full-scale version is still a 2027 story.<\/p>\n
Dogger Bank is being built in three chunks, each rated at 1.2 gigawatts and each named, with admirable simplicity, Dogger Bank A, B, and C. Phase A is the one that just got finished, at least as far as the turbines go. According to OffshoreWind.biz<\/a>, the 95th and final GE Haliade-X turbine on Dogger Bank A was installed in the first half of February 2026, after the installation vessel spent months fighting the kind of weather windows that make North Sea construction a test of patience. The same notices show the vessel then moving straight on to Dogger Bank B, where turbine installation is scheduled to run until roughly the second quarter of 2027.<\/p>\n So when you see Dogger Bank described as “nearing completion,” keep the scope straight. Phase A’s turbines are all up and heading toward full commercial operation later this year. Phase B has a couple dozen turbines in the water and a long way left to go. Phase C is still under construction. The project did not exactly arrive on schedule, either. It was originally meant to wrap in 2025 and got pushed back a year by weather and two separate incidents involving damaged blades. None of that makes it less impressive. It just makes “world’s biggest wind farm, finished” a headline worth holding off on until 2027.<\/p>\n Here is where the scale stops being abstract. Each of Dogger Bank’s turbines stands 260 meters tall, or roughly 850 feet, which Equinor<\/a> points out is close to the height of New York’s Rockefeller Center and nearly twice the size of the London Eye. There will be 277 of them once all three phases are done. The site sits 80 to 125 miles (130 to 200 km) off the Yorkshire coast on a shallow North Sea sandbank, and Equinor describes the footprint as almost as large as Greater London and nearly twice the size of New York City.<\/p>\n At full output, the developers say the 3.6-gigawatt farm will power the equivalent of about 6 million British homes. The turbines are GE Haliade-X machines rated at 13 megawatts each, and when the first one started turning back in October 2023, it was the first time a 13-megawatt Haliade-X had been energized offshore anywhere in the world. Dogger Bank also became the first British wind farm to move its power to shore using high-voltage direct current, or HVDC, instead of the alternating current most older offshore farms rely on. That choice matters more the farther out you build, because HVDC loses less electricity over long undersea cables, and Dogger Bank is a long way out.<\/p>\n The project is a joint venture, owned 40% by SSE Renewables<\/a>, 40% by Norway’s Equinor, and 20% by V\u00e5rgr\u00f8nn, with SSE leading construction and Equinor set to run the farm for an expected 35-year life. Olly Cass, SSE Renewables’ project director for Dogger Bank, calls it “a world-leading development pushing the boundaries of offshore wind development.” The money runs into the billions; the partners took a final investment decision worth 5.5 billion pounds on phases A and B alone back in 2020.<\/p>\n This is the part that should land differently if you are reading from the US. The same Equinor that co-owns and will operate the world’s biggest wind farm off Yorkshire is also the company behind Empire Wind, a project meant to power more than 500,000 homes off New York. Empire Wind is not getting topped out this year. It is one of five East Coast projects the federal government suspended in December 2025.<\/p>\n The stated reason was national security. According to NBC News<\/a>, the Interior Department paused the leases after the Pentagon raised concerns that the moving blades and reflective towers of offshore turbines could interfere with military radar, generating “clutter” that masks real targets or throws up false ones. The five projects caught in that order were Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts, Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Connecticut, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, and both Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind off New York. It landed two weeks after a federal judge vacated an earlier executive order against wind energy, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.”<\/p>\n The wind industry’s answer to the radar argument is that the Pentagon already worked through it. As Military.com<\/a> reported, the offshore-leasing bureau says it consulted at least a dozen federal agencies over the years, including the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard and NORAD, and that their concerns were “mitigated.” At one point Revolution Wind’s developers even paid for a software patch to clear up an Air Force radar issue. That history is part of why the national-security framing has met skepticism in court and in Congress. No final ruling has settled whether the suspension itself is lawful.<\/p>\n The timing stung because some of these projects were nearly done. Revolution Wind was about 80% complete, with 45 of its 65 turbines already standing when the order hit. Empire Wind was less far along but well underway after a seven-year permitting process. New York’s attorney general has sued to get the two New York projects moving again, arguing the state needs them to power around a million homes. It is the same broader standoff that has built Britain’s offshore lead while Washington keeps stalling permitted American projects<\/a>, and the bill for stopping work is not small. Earlier this year, news outlets reported the federal government had struck deals to pay several developers to halt permitted projects outright.<\/p>\n Strip away the politics and the contrast is almost entirely about will. Britain has a windy patch of shallow North Sea, a process that let a multi-billion-pound project clear its first phase, and a government that is not trying to stop it. The US has its own windy coastlines, projects that already cleared years of federal and state review, and turbines that were sometimes a few dozen units short of finished. What it does not have right now is permission to keep building.<\/p>\n The global picture only sharpens it. While American projects sit frozen, China just floated a record-size turbine in water too deep for any fixed foundation<\/a>, pushing into ocean that fixed-bottom farms like Dogger Bank cannot reach. Dogger Bank’s first phase went up because someone kept letting the vessel sail. That, more than the wind or the engineering, is what separates a finished turbine from a half-built one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you have followed offshore wind in the US over the past year, you mostly know it as a list … <\/p>\nEach Turbine Is About the Height of Rockefeller Center<\/h2>\n
Equinor Is Building on Both Coasts. Only One Side Gets to Finish.<\/h2>\n
The Wind, the Coastline and the Permits Are All There<\/h2>\n