Offshore wind – a sector that has faced more than its fair share of headwinds across Asia – is the top of conversation for this latest Infra Dig podcast, with 2 guests giving a round-robin assessment of the opportunities on the ground… well, at sea, really.

IJGlobal editorial director Angus Leslie Melville meets over Teams with 2 Singapore-based partners from Norton Rose Fulbright – Nick Merritt and Ben Carrozzi to discuss this burgeoning sector.

This is the first in a series of podcast that IJ is hosting in anticipation of a conference we will be hosting in Singapore on 18 and 19 November – Infrastructure Finance Forum: Asia 2025.

The podcast runs for a little more than 33 minutes, giving a helicopter view of the market, drilling down into the markets that are showing most promise.

This latest episode can be accessed on Spotify (embedded above) as well as through Apple Podcasts and on the Amazon service. It is also hosted across a slew of other platforms, open access on all of them.

Conversation centres on the key markets like Taiwan where construction is almost complete on the first offshore wind farms (OWF) and moves on to (sectoral) emerging markets that include Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Australia and India.

One of the global themes that is playing out across the offshore wind sector (OWS) is seen in Asia… where developers have the luxury to pick and choose where they focus efforts, cherry picking the right places to play.

Ben starts off, saying that the same issues faced in Europe (where he had been operating until the end of last year before relocating to Singapore) are playing out across Asia.

“At a macro level, it is fair to say that the challenges have been similar,” says Ben. “Things like disruption to supply chains, inflationary pressures, and cost volatility have all made it difficult to appropriately budget, plan and deliver projects effectively against moving targets. That is true of Europe, but also of Asia.

“But in some respects, these issues have really been exacerbated in the context of Asia, whereas European markets are more mature, and therefore they contain a better established supply chain which makes it easier for them to respond practically to some of these issues by relying on some of the regional capacity that exists, but also on greater regional collaboration to address and mitigate these issues.

“This has been more difficult to achieve in Asia, not least due to the distances between the various markets which makes supply chain localisation as well as the availability of domestic infrastructure vessels and other similar resources, all the more important.”

The conversation flows and Nick takes the listener on a tour of key markets that are driving regional activity as well as those that show greatest potential – the likes of India which installed 57GW of renewable energy in 2024 alone and is forging towards achieving its 500GW target.

Nick says: “There are opportunities and there have been some sites identified for offshore wind in India and – from a policy perspective – I think the government is keen.

“But the delta at the moment on the pricing is perhaps still a bit of a challenge as to ultimately who would be the customers or consumers willing to pay for that energy.

“The government is looking at an auction round where it's being sold into corporate PPAs and maybe that's part of the answer here… the price is effectively indirectly covered in the market by being initially passed on to corporates and whether they pass that on to their customers or not.”

Tune into the latest episode to hear a lot more about the regional market…