BSH offshore grid plan opens for consultation as investment bill nears €145bn

The BSH offshore grid plan has entered public consultation, with Germany’s Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) publishing a draft infrastructure areas plan that for the first time designates routes, route corridors and platform locations for offshore grid connection lines. The document is intended to sit alongside the existing Area Development Plan (FEP) for offshore wind, filling a spatial-planning gap that has, until now, left the cable and platform footprint of Germany’s offshore grid largely undefined on paper.

What the BSH offshore grid plan actually does

The draft sets out where offshore grid connection infrastructure can physically go: not just which wind areas will be developed, but the corridors through which power will reach shore and the locations where offshore converter platforms will sit. That is a material step beyond the FEP, which governs where turbines go rather than how electrons travel from them. Authorities have until 21 September 2026 to submit comments on the draft; the general public has until 19 October 2026. BSH says it plans to update the infrastructure areas plan regularly as the offshore programme evolves.

The current site development plan, for context, was published on 30 January 2025, meaning this new infrastructure layer follows it by roughly eighteen months. Whether the sequencing reflects deliberate phasing or a planning lag is a reasonable question, though the BSH has not addressed it in the consultation documents made available so far.

The capital commitment behind the corridors

The routes and corridors being pinned down in this draft are not abstract lines on a nautical chart. According to the Netzentwicklungsplan (Germany’s Network Development Plan), the offshore expansion grid carries an estimated investment volume of around €77 billion for the scenario A 2037 case alone. For the long-term 2045 scenarios (A, B and C) that figure rises to around €145.1 billion, including interconnection. To put the physical scale alongside the financial one: those 2045 scenarios imply a transmission capacity of about 60 GW, delivered through grid connection systems totalling approximately 13,300 km in length, excluding the initial grid.

Those are numbers that belong in any serious discussion of what this consultation is actually about. The BSH is, in effect, drawing the map for a grid infrastructure programme that the Netzentwicklungsplan values at roughly the same order of magnitude as a mid-sized sovereign infrastructure fund. Getting the route corridors and platform locations wrong at this stage has consequences that compound over decades of asset life.

Greenwash risk is low here; execution risk is not

This is one of those moments where the announcement is harder to fault on substance than on timing. A spatial plan for offshore grid connections is exactly the kind of foundational regulatory work that serious offshore expansion requires, and BSH’s commitment to regular updates is the right design choice for a sector where technology, capacity targets and interconnection agreements shift on a five-year cycle. The complaint is not that this plan exists; it is that Germany’s offshore ambitions have been in place long enough that a first-ever designation of route corridors feels overdue rather than pioneering.

The consultation structure is conventional and appropriate: a shorter window for competent authorities, a longer one for the public. What matters now is whether the comments period produces substantive engagement from transmission system operators, who will ultimately build the infrastructure these corridors contain, and from the maritime and environmental bodies whose sign-off will govern whether any given corridor can be used at all.

BSH has not published a timeline for finalising the plan following the consultation period, but the regular-update commitment at least signals that this is intended as a living document rather than a once-a-decade exercise.