How much offshore wind could Africa build, 95 gigawatts of potential in South Africa alone and only 1.6 gigawatts planned across the whole continent

How much offshore wind could Africa build

A new offshore wind strategic framework, a study the World Bank funded to work out how much wind power a coastline can technically support, finds that South Africa alone could build about 95 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity. Technical potential means the total amount turbines could generate if built everywhere the wind, the water depth and the seabed allow, not what a country will actually build. The Carbon Trust prepared the framework under contract to the World Bank Energy Sector Management Assistance Programme, and it launched in September 2026 at the Africa Green Hydrogen Summit. The study measures that potential against the 2,800 kilometre coastline of South Africa.

Three deployment paths to 2050, and what they cost

The framework does not expect South Africa to build all 95 gigawatts. It models 3 deployment paths to 2050, meaning 3 different plans for how much of that potential actually gets built, a low path of 5 gigawatts, a mid path of 15 gigawatts and a high path of 40 gigawatts, supplying about 6%, 16% and 26% of national electricity demand. Reaching the high path means building 2.5 to 3 gigawatts of offshore wind every year through the 2040s. The framework prices fixed foundation turbines, built on the seabed, at 94 to 116 dollars a megawatt hour for delivery in 2035, and floating turbines, anchored in deeper water, at 97 to 126 dollars, both well above the 32 dollars a megawatt hour that onshore wind averaged in South Africa in 2021, in an earlier government renewable power auction called bid window 5. It also projects the price of floating wind falling to 47 to 60 dollars a megawatt hour by 2050 under the high path, alongside more than 300,000 years of full time work and 6.7 billion dollars in wages created between 2030 and 2050.

South Africa is endowed with nearly 2,800 km of coastline, globally competitive offshore wind resources, strategic ports and coastal industrial corridors.

Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, Minister of Electricity and Energy for South Africa. Source 3.

Two cities show the real scale of the potential

Reading the regional breakdown inside the framework, not only its headline national number, shows where that scale actually sits. Floating turbines off Cape Town could generate 6.4 gigawatts, about 3.2 times the roughly 2 gigawatts of electricity Cape Town uses at peak demand. Off Durban the potential reaches 17.4 gigawatts, about 10 times the roughly 1.7 gigawatts eThekwini, the Durban municipality, uses at its own peak. This publication calculated those multiples by dividing the potential figures by the demand figures for each city, a comparison the framework itself does not state.

Today, almost none of it is built

None of this is built yet. A commercial database tracking wind farms across 26 African countries counts exactly 3 offshore wind projects on the whole continent, all still at the planning stage, totalling 1.6 gigawatts, against 14.8 gigawatts of onshore wind already operating or under construction. One of those 3 planned projects is the 800 megawatt Gagasi project near Richards Bay, proposed in 2022 by the joint venture GenesisHexicon and still sitting inside a 10 kilometre coastal buffer zone the framework discusses. Building offshore wind at scale, industry figures argue, is not a job for 1 country working alone.

Offshore wind is not an opportunity that can be developed effectively by countries acting independently.

Viren Sookhun, managing director at Workforce Staffing Africa. Source 1.