BWO elects Equinor's Benedikt Scheel as chair at 8 September AGM

Germany's offshore wind trade association BWO elected Benedikt Scheel as chair of its board of directors at its annual general meeting on 8 September 2026, for a two-year term^[1]. Scheel, who serves as Managing Director and Head of Policy & Regulation Germany Power at Equinor, succeeds Irina Lucke, who had held the chair since 2024^[1].

New board composition

The full board elected at the AGM is:

• Chair: Benedikt Scheel (Equinor)
• Deputy chair: Korbinian Ott, Commercial Director at Steelwind Nordenham
• Deputy chair: Till Schwarzlose, Director Development EU at RWE Offshore
• CFO: Lena Büsing, Managing Director of Merkur Offshore^[1]

Lucke, Managing Director of Omexom Renewable Energies Offshore, leaves the board alongside outgoing deputies Till Frohloff of Nordsee One and Holger Matthiesen of Luxcara^[1].

Timing and policy backdrop

BWO managing director Stefan Thimm framed the election as arriving at a critical juncture. The German Federal Cabinet adopted an amendment to the Offshore Wind Energy Act (WindSeeG) on 2 September 2026, just days before the AGM, and the draft now moves through parliament with a target entry into force of 1 January 2027.

The association has been a vocal critic of the draft's CfD design. The WindSeeG amendment proposes a two-stage auction in which CfD support is only triggered if no developer bids in the initial merchant round - a structure BWO has publicly rejected, calling instead for a CfD-only model as the standard from the outset. The association argues that multi-billion-euro offshore projects require predictable support structures, not a mechanism that defaults to merchant exposure first.

The stakes are substantial. BWO estimates that projects awarded in the 2023-2025 tender rounds and not yet at final investment decision represent project and procurement volumes of up to €50 billion. The association has called for a temporary return option for those projects, which the current draft does not include.

The backdrop to all of this is a market that stalled badly: a 2.5 GW tender for sites N-10.1 and N-10.2 attracted no bids in August 2025, and the government subsequently suspended the 2026 auction round entirely, pushing the next tender to 2027. Germany's statutory target of 70 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2045 remains on the books.

What Scheel said

In a statement issued alongside the election, Scheel pointed directly at investment conditions: "A secure energy supply in Germany requires a strong expansion of offshore wind energy. Reliable political framework conditions that effectively reduce costs are crucial for this so that Germany can continue to attract investment in the future."^[1]

Thimm added that the new board's mandate is to represent the industry's interests in a unified way precisely while the WindSeeG amendment is being negotiated^[1].

What to watch

The WindSeeG amendment's parliamentary passage is the immediate test for the new board. BWO's demand for a CfD-only standard - rather than a fallback - is the central unresolved point. Whether the Bundestag amends the two-stage design before the law takes effect in January 2027 will determine whether Germany's 2027 tender round draws the bids that 2025 did not.