Gone with the wind: how state power and industrial policy in the offshore wind power sector are blowing away the obstacles to East Asia’s green energy transition

Offshore wind power (OWP) is emerging as the fastest growing sector in the global race towards renewables, and likely to emerge in just a few years as the largest segment in absolute terms. It has grown from accounting for just 1% of wind power capacity in 2010 to 10% by 2019 and is anticipated to reach 20% early in the 2020s. The OWP sector involves heavy engineering in the building of huge turbines, steel and concrete platforms, and extensive subsea cabling that resembles the shipbuilding industry more than mass production of consumables like solar cells. European firms were early developers of OWP but are now witnessing the rise of strong competitors from Northeast Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan) as well as potentially the USA. We use the framework of developmental environmentalism to argue that NEAsian developmental state traditions are being extended in the way that firms and governments from the region are promoting OWP. We frame an evolutionary political economy (EPE) argument that characterizes these NEAsian states as in their different ways utilizing OWP as a sustainable and scalable renewable energy source, particularly when linked to green hydrogen production, and are developing a new generation of industrial policies to break down resistance to the energy transition. We frame an argument for these NEAsian transitions as continuing the developmental tradition in what has been described as developmental environmentalism, with state agencies playing a continuing role in setting new directions — in this case towards OWP. We contrast this framework with that of the widely recognized multilevel perspective (MLP) with its emphasis on bottom-up processes. We highlight the role played by fossil fuel companies in finding a place for themselves in the green transition, as they diversify from oil and gas operations (e.g., floating oil platforms) to renewable energy operations (offshore wind), redeploying their resources and capabilities to do so.