Early risk awareness and intervention for long-term project success
- Precedent Consultants
- Jul 3
- 5 min read
Greater investment at the conceptual phase of projects leads to early-stage de-risking and drastically reduces overall project costs. Precedent, 2026
An offshore wind farm can take upwards of 12 years to move from initial concept to first power. Over a timeline of this length, a project will certainly face many challenges and risks, but early identification, understanding of risks, and ultimate mitigation are key to successful delivery.
From day one, through decades of several years of offshore surveys, a plethora of engineering tasks, supply chain hazards and offshore installation challenges, there are threats to your timeline, your budget, and ultimately, your professional reputation. As former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld (see Figure 1) famously put it:
"There are known knowns... There are known unknowns... But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
In offshore wind, the goal of engineering risk management is to convert those unwanted "unknown unknowns" into manageable "knowns." But how do you identify these when projects are growing larger, moving into deeper waters, and facing unprecedented macroeconomic margin pressures? This is best done by leveraging the technical expertise of those who provide actionable, experience-based advice and guidance.
Quantifying the Ground Beneath Us: Geotechnical Risk
Early geotechnical risk assessment is the basis of concept selection and the secret to overall reduction in project risk (Figure 2). In an industry where margins are tightly squeezed by inflation and supply chain bottlenecks, managers need to make decisions based on costs, not only on the data required.
By quantifying the cost of the consequences of uncertainty, projects can then build dynamic and more informative risk and opportunity matrices. This allows developers to safely evaluate alternative foundation concepts and quantify the exact probability of specific outcomes (such as installation refusal at complex sites). As Page & Bienen (2026) describe, more data equals less risk.
The Multi-Contracting Paradox
To keep costs down, the industry is shifting away from traditional, bundled EPCI (Engineering, Procurement, Construction, and Installation) contracts and towards multi-contracting strategies (as detailed in BGV Associates, 2025, Procurement structures | Guide to an offshore wind farm). However, while contracting directly with multiple specialised suppliers saves on margin, it introduces interface risk: the more interfaces, the greater the interdependencies. Every component of a multi-contracting model is affected by the decisions made at the outset of projects and evolves through the project lifecycle. As shown in Figure 3, several interfaces are required between the components of the supply chain at various project stages.
If these aren't formally managed or understood, they quickly evolve into project showstoppers.
Common Triggers for a Project Showstopper:
The Experience Gap: Integrating new contractors who lack deep offshore wind or regional market maturity.
Technical Escalation: Bigger turbines, deeper water, and highly complex geology/unforeseen ground conditions.
Supply Chain Squeezes: Tight vessel availability and supply chains that are not ready.
Interface Friction: Mismanaged boundaries between split packages.
A Tale of Three Approaches: Which Developer Are You?
The difference between a successful project and an irrevocable delay is based on how you bridge the expertise gap. Consider these three real-world scenarios:
Scenario 1: "Going It Alone" A developer attempts to manage a major contract without sufficient in-house experience or by underestimating the experience within the developer team. They provide inaccurate ground data due to a flawed ground assessment. The result? Catastrophic issues such as the belief that a single ground investigation was all that was required for the wind farm, leading to insufficient ground information, frozen decisions, and a lack of integration and trust with designers and contractors.
Scenario 2: "The Internal Silos" The developer adopts a multi-contract approach but fails to integrate the strategy. The survey, engineering, cables, and commercial teams operate in complete silos. While each individual team boasts they are "under-budget" the reduction of costs at the beginning leads to massive unresolved interface and holistic project risk appearing at a later stage of the project resulting in significantly higher costs.
Scenario 3: "The Integrated Solution" The developer brings in an experienced Owner’s Advisor early. By facilitating rigorous risk workshops and fostering cross-package collaboration, they seamlessly manage supplier interdependencies. Redundancies are eliminated, surprises are avoided, and the project achieves first power on time and within budget.
Bridging the Gap
Some operators/developers do not wish to have the engineering done in-house. This is completely understandable, and a large, permanent in-house engineering team is not needed to successfully execute a multi-contract procurement route. All that is needed is collaboration with technical partners of the ideal calibre.
At Precedent Consultants, we aim to act as your Owner’s Advisor to bridge the expertise gap, formally manage complex interfaces, and neutralise project showstoppers before they throw your project schedule and costs off course.
Precedent has established our reputation in the civil engineering space with a lean public-facing team. Our value lies in sharing real-world insights gained through scars and experience. We advocate a shift in how projects are traditionally managed, specifically challenging the "siloed" approach, in which managers are encouraged to overprotect isolated budgets. Instead, we emphasise that greater investment in thorough, early-stage de-risking during the conceptual phase drastically reduces overall project costs.
When an experienced Owner’s Advisor steps in and suggests more upfront spending on critical areas, whether that’s exhaustive soil and pile testing, expanding project teams or resources, leveraging academic partnerships, or utilising advanced testing, such as cyclic triaxial or centrifuge testing, they are often faced with initial resistance as teams are compelled to operate in the original way. But Precedent will guarantee that allocating a fit-for-purpose budget to bring in the right experts earlier in the project dissolves the structural silos that plague large projects. Ultimately, by boldly identifying these early risks and spending where it matters, developers save time and money, resulting in a significantly cheaper, smoother, and more secure project overall.
Visit www.precedentconsultants.com to learn more about our services or to schedule a call to discuss your project needs.
Key references
BVG Associates. (2025). Guide to an offshore wind farm. Published on behalf of The Crown Estate, Crown Estate Scotland, Offshore Wind Growth Partnership, ORE Catapult, and the Scottish Enterprise Agencies: Scottish Enterprise, Highlands & Island Enterprise and South of Scotland Enterprise. Link
Maloney, K. (2026). Why Interface Management is Critical for Offshore Wind Projects Link
Page, A. and Bienen, B. 2026. Geotechnics for offshore wind developments. In: Pistrol, A. and Schweiger, H. eds. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ICSMGE), Vienna, Austria, 14-19 June 2026. Salzburg: ÖGG, Austrian Society for Geomechanics, pp. 95-117. Available at: https://doi.org/10.53243/ICSMGE2026-9.
Thusyanthan, I., Champness, D. and King, R. (2024). 'Insight into Risk Management of Offshore Wind Farm Projects', in Proceedings of the International Conference on Ocean Energy. Melbourne, 17-19 September 2024. London/Auckland: International Conference on Ocean Energy, pp. 179-1–179-5. Link
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