Ask most people what stands between the Netherlands and its offshore wind targets, and they will talk about grid capacity, permitting timelines, or the availability of installation vessels. Almost nobody will mention gulls, harbour porpoises, or sand-dwelling benthic worms. And yet, by 2032, offshore wind farms will occupy roughly 4.4% of the Dutch North Sea – a hard, physical footprint layered onto a body of water that was never empty to begin with. That is the constraint the sector doesn’t talk about enough: not whether we can build fast enough, but whether we can keep sharing the water we build in with the original inhabitants: marine life.

The ambition is real and steep: a target of 21 gigawatts by 2032, three-quarters of Dutch electricity demand, rising toward 30 to 40 gigawatts by 2040. Every one of those gigawatts sits on top of an ecosystem. The Dutch government has been explicit about this: it has asked developers to strike a balance between producing energy and safeguarding ecological interests, rather than simply maximising megawatts per square kilometre. That instruction changes what “delivering a project” means. It stops being purely an engineering and financing exercise and becomes something closer to co-managing a shared habitat under a deadline.

Ecological integration is not a layer you add to a wind farm once the engineering is settled. It is a project management discipline in its own right. Governed, resourced, and risk-managed with the same seriousness as cost, schedule, and safety. Treat it as anything less, and you get symbolic gestures that don’t survive contact with a construction schedule. Treat it as a genuine discipline, and it starts to look a lot like the rest of good project management: clear scope, empowered decision-makers, and a relentless focus on turning unknowns into evidence.

The tension nobody resolves, only manages

There is a structural contradiction sitting at the heart of this work, and it is worth naming rather than smoothing over. Ecological innovation wants what most innovation wants: a can-do mindset, tolerance for high risk, short pilot cycles, and the freedom to change course quickly when something isn’t working. Offshore wind infrastructure wants the opposite: standardised, reliability-driven delivery, assets designed to run for 20 to 40 years, slower and more deliberate decision-making, and strict adherence to operational frameworks and legislation. Government incentives reward the former. The asset itself demands the latter. Every ecological pilot has to hold both at once, and that is genuinely difficult. Not a talking point, a design constraint.

The resolution is not to pick a side but to be disciplined about where each mindset applies. Ecology, done properly, is built in from the first design decision — seabed layout, foundation type, cable routing — rather than bolted onto a finished design as a mitigation measure. But the pilots that test new ecological technology still need to behave like pilots: bounded, monitored, and judged on data-based evidence, not on ambition. Complexity in design increases risk in delivery. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make the risk go away; it just moves it downstream, usually to the point where it’s most expensive to fix.

Governance has to reach the water, not stop at the boardroom

None of this works without decision-making structures built for it. Ecowende’s governance runs in three tiers: our shareholders Shell, Eneco and Chubu setting direction with an advisory committee that expands around the topic at hand; an executive committee representing the full matrix of project phases and functions; and a project team where the engineers closest to execution are also the contract holders, empowered to decide within their remit. The point of that structure isn’t hierarchy for its own sake. It’s that decisions sit at the level closest to the information, while staying aligned with the people accountable for the outcome.

That same logic shaped how we contracted with partners, including main contractors Vestas and Van Oord, and ecology contractors such as Waardenburg Ecology, Robin Radar Systems and DHI MUSE. Our multi-contracting strategy was partly driven by the competitive landscape during the tender phase and by the qualitative tender strategy we chose. Rather than placing the full scope with a single integrator, it allowed us, from the integrator’s perspective, to retain direct oversight of innovation and the associated risks to the delivery schedule. This is particularly important in a project where new technologies and ecological pilots are being developed and implemented alongside construction. No individual contractor would have the full overview needed to coordinate these interfaces and manage the combined risks effectively. The trade-off was that we took on more interfaces ourselves, but it gave us the control and oversight needed to steer innovation while keeping the overall project on track.

Ecological monitoring as an engineering-grade operation

The clearest evidence that ecology can be run with real discipline is what it looks like in practice, not in principle. Our ecological programme follows a clear cycle: first, building a strong understanding of the most urgent potential impacts; then putting wind-farm-wide measures in place; implementing innovations and pilots at full scale within the wind farm; and using large-scale monitoring to validate their effectiveness. Innovations in monitoring are essential to making this approach cost-effective, generating more and better data while bringing down the cost of monitoring and helping close knowledge gaps for the wider sector.

The specifics matter more than the categories. For birds, that means a designated corridor, taller turbines, red-topcoat blades to improve visibility, and AI-based recognition feeding into refined curtailment — six locations run active bird deterrence, seven use red blades, and twenty turbines carry recognition software tuned to location specific bird behaviour patterns. For harbour porpoises, it means noise mitigation on the impact hammer, piloting vibro and vibro-jet installation techniques as quieter alternatives, and a passive acoustic monitoring network that listens continuously rather than sampling occasionally. For the seabed, it means ecological scour protection, tree reefs built from discarded fruit trees, and oyster hubs, introducing hard substrate into a mostly sandy habitat to rehabilitate benthic life rather than merely protect the foundations.

The multiplier is sharing, not scale

A single project’s ecological performance, however carefully engineered, is close to worthless to the wider transition unless the data and lessons behind it are shared. We built a Knowledge Hub around this idea, an internal data management system, and an independent ecological advisory panel led by IUCN to challenge our own assumptions rather than confirm them. Externally, that translates into public webinars, raw data made available to researchers filling their own knowledge gaps, and — more unusually for an infrastructure project — an interactive exhibition on offshore wind and North Sea biodiversity at Rotterdam Blijdorp Zoo, aimed at the next generation of engineers, ecologists, and policymakers.

Our own takeaways are clear

First, get the project management basics right. Scope definition, risk management and clear communication still do most of the work, however sophisticated the ecology becomes. But project management is also a team sport: we need to create alignment around the mission, build a one-team culture and enable effective collaboration across disciplines and organisations.

Second, integrated ecological measures are here to stay. They are not a phase we pass through, but an integral part of how we need to deliver projects. That means established companies teaming up with ecologists, start-ups and innovators, sharing both risk and reward.

And finally, we only create real value for society if others can build on what we learn. That means sharing our data, knowledge and experience — and measuring our success not only by what we deliver ourselves, but by what becomes standard practice in the projects that follow. The next gigawatts of offshore wind will be built with less room to spare than the last. Whether that remains possible will depend less on turbine size and more on whether we treat the ecosystem we share as seriously as the assets we build within it.