What we took from GOW26

By Laurie Thornton, engineer, MintMech

We spent two days at Global Offshore Wind 2026 in Manchester, mostly listening. The keynotes do the gigawatts and the targets; the more useful signal is on the technical platforms and the show floor, where people are working on the unglamorous problems that decide whether a project actually gets built. A couple of themes stood out. Neither is solved, but both point the same way and that direction is one MintMech is comfortable backing. (The deep-water fixed-bottom question that also ran through the event we’ve taken up separately, in a piece of its own.)

We are a supplier and manufacturer, not a technology buyer, so read this as an engineering read from the build side of the table, not an endorsement of any one product. Where speakers quoted figures, treat them as their claims, not ours.

The under-engineered side of wet storage: mooring and anchoring

Wet storage, parking floating foundations near shore between fabrication and tow-out, is becoming a real bottleneck for floating wind. Most of the attention has gone to ports, consenting and environmental approval. Far less has gone to the part that actually holds the asset: how you moor and anchor it safely in near-shore conditions.

That is a genuine engineering gap, and a more interesting one than it sounds. Near-shore geology is not North Sea geology, estuarine sediments behave differently, so offshore mooring solutions do not map straight across. Shallow water brings its own wave-load problems. And because these moorings are temporary and must be removed cleanly, the work points away from drag anchors and chain dragging across the seabed toward precision, removable anchors, pile or vibro-installed types that can be placed accurately, monitored and recovered with low seabed impact.

This is squarely our territory: precise, removable, well-instrumented seabed engineering and the discipline of turning a one-off methodology into something repeatable and industrialised. The theme to watch is the move from a bespoke study to a template that can be produced, installed, inspected and monitored at scale, which is precisely what we do: turning a bespoke, one-off scope into something repeatable.

Minimally invasive risk mitigation that doesn’t disrupt the method

The second theme was narrower but a good example of right-sized engineering. Pile run, the uncontrolled self-weight penetration of a monopile during installation, sits at the top of the installation risk register for good reason: its worst cases run to loss of the pile, damage to the asset or worse. Several mitigations exist, from vibro hammers to clamping methods and they vary widely in how much they disturb the installation campaign.

The approach that caught our attention was a minimally invasive one: a device pre-installed in the pile at the quayside that does nothing until the pile passes its expected driving depth, then acts to brake the descent, leaving the normal hammer-driven method essentially untouched. Whether that specific device proves out is for its developers and the test programme to show. The principle is the one we like: solve a single, serious risk with a clean, well-specified bit of kit that fits the existing method, rather than re-engineering the whole operation around the mitigation. The cheapest risk control is usually the one that changes the least.

The thread

Both themes carry the same engineering instinct: stay inside what the supply chain can already build, specify the solution tightly and don’t add complexity the problem doesn’t demand. That is not a conservative position, wet-storage mooring and pile-run control are both hard, open problems. It is a buildable one. From where we sit, on the manufacturing side, that is the right instinct and the one we design to. It’s also the instinct behind the deep-water fixed-bottom concepts at the show, which is why we gave those their own piece.