Where the sector actually stands.
Feasibility licences for offshore wind off Gippsland in Victoria have been granted to a first group of projects including High Sea Wind, Gippsland Skies, Blue Mackerel North, Kut Wut Brataualung, an Orsted project and Star of the South. A further group has progressed through assessment and into First Nations consultation, including Iberdrola's Aurora Green, Gippsland Dawn, Navigator North, a second Orsted project, Kent Offshore Wind and Great Eastern.
The Illawarra went the other way. Applications were open through the middle of 2024 and no feasibility licences were awarded. In January 2026 the government confirmed it would not grant any Illawarra licences because no application could be progressed.
The national targets remain 2 GW of offshore wind by 2032, 4 GW by 2035 and 9 GW by 2040. The honest reading is that the 2032 target now rests on a single region and a small number of projects within it.
What a feasibility licence is and is not.
This matters for anyone making a career decision on the back of the headlines. A feasibility licence is permission to investigate. It funds surveys, metocean and geotechnical work, environmental assessment, grid connection studies and the consultation program. It is not a construction decision and it is not financial close.
So the hiring that follows a feasibility licence is development hiring, and it is a small number of people per project. Development directors, consents and approvals managers, stakeholder and First Nations engagement leads, marine and geotechnical coordinators, grid connection engineers, package managers for survey campaigns. Measured in tens of roles across the whole Gippsland cluster, not hundreds.
The large workforce event, the fabrication, marine installation, port and construction workforce, sits behind financial investment decisions that are years away and are not certain to arrive. Anyone telling candidates that Australian offshore wind is a large employment market today is overselling it.
The genuine workforce questions.
- There is no Australian offshore wind construction workforce. There is a strong offshore oil and gas workforce with directly relevant marine, subsea, installation and HSE capability. That is the pool, and the transition path from offshore energy into offshore wind is the most sensible workforce story in this sector.
- Port and fabrication capability is the binding constraint. Offshore wind needs heavy lift port infrastructure and marshalling capacity. The port investment decisions determine the construction workforce question, and they are being made slowly.
- The experienced people are overseas and expensive. European and Taiwanese offshore wind experience is the only real source of senior delivery capability, and Australia is bidding for it against markets with larger, more certain pipelines.
- The Illawarra outcome has a real cost. A second region would have created competitive tension, port justification and a reason for international contractors to invest in Australian capability. One region does not.
Our honest position.
We have been cautious on Australian offshore wind for two years and we remain cautious. The Gippsland cluster is real, the licences are a genuine step, and Star of the South in particular has been developed seriously for a long time. But the gap between a feasibility licence and a construction workforce is wide, and the 2032 target has very little margin left in it.
For clients: hire the development and consenting capability now, because it is scarce and it is what the next three years actually need. Do not build a construction organisation against a date that has not been committed.
For candidates: if you are in offshore oil and gas and interested in this sector, the transferable skills are real and the timing is not yet. Build the marine and offshore delivery record where the work currently is, and move when a project reaches investment decision rather than when it reaches a press release.