The North Sea has long been host to some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and hundreds of rigs for producing oil and natural gas. Now, if European leaders have their way, this shallow and often turbulent stretch of water will, in the coming years, see what could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investment aimed at reducing carbon emissions and further shrinking imports of fossil fuels from Russia. At a summit held in Ostend, a Belgian port, in April, the leaders of nine European governments pledged to work together to roughly quadruple the already substantial amount of offshore wind generation capacity in the North Sea and nearby waters by 2030 and to increase it by about tenfold by 2050. Significantly, the meeting, attended by Ursula von der Leyen, the European Union president, included Britain, which recently went through a rancorous divorce from the bloc, and Norway, which is also not an E.U. The offshore areas around these two countries have the greatest potential for wind investment.

---

Persons: Ursula von der Leyen Organizations: European Union Locations: Russia, Ostend, Belgian, Britain, Norway