State aid in the Belgian offshore wind ecosystem

By Dr. Pablo Muylle

[February 2026]

Dr. Pablo Muylle is a researcher at the Department of Economics at Ghent University. He is part of the BE-WISE research team. He has expertise in Belgian and European industrial policy, state-owned firms, and global value chains.

Executive summary

Industrial policy has returned to the forefront of the global economic debate, driven by the imperatives of the green transition and intensifying competition from the United States' Inflation Reduction Act and China's manufacturing base. In response, the European Union has pivoted toward a more active stance through the Green Deal Industrial Plan and the Clean Industrial State Aid Framework (CISAF). Within this shifting landscape, Belgium's offshore wind energy (OWE) sector represents a strategic success story. Despite a coastline of barely sixty kilometres, Belgium has developed an extensive supply chain of manufacturers, contractors, and specialised service providers that is now navigating a period of rising costs and heightened international competition. As the EU considers new instruments like the European Competitiveness Fund to maintain a level playing field, understanding the existing footprint of public support is essential. This report provides a systematic mapping of the state aid landscape for that supply chain, detailing the profile of recipients, the volume of funding, the underlying policy objectives, and the legal instruments involved. The data cover the years 2016 to 2023 and draw on three sources: the European Commission's Transparency Award Module (TAM), Moody's Orbis Europe firm-level financial database, and the underlying state aid case files from the Commission's competition register. The exercise is descriptive by design. With 37 aided firms in the preferred supply chain sample and no credible counterfactual, the report does not aim at establishing causal effects.

Main findings

Belgian OWE-linked state aid is, in practice, R&D policy. Only about 16 percent of supply chain firms, 37 of 229 in the preferred qualitative sample (excluding wind farm operators), received state aid above the TAM reporting threshold at all. Those 37 firms account for 75 cases and a total of approximately EUR 134 million. Of that total, close to EUR 124 million, or around 92 percent by value, is classified under R&D and Innovation objectives. Environment and energy, regional development, and business and training support together account for the remainder. The instrument mix mirrors this: direct grants dominate in case count, while the federal partial withholding tax exemption for research personnel accounts for a large fraction of total value through a smaller number of recurring tax-advantage cases. This R&D weight is likely still understated in a broader ecosystem sense, because many research activities sit in universities, public research organisations and government bodies that are not part of the firm-level supply chain database used here. Belgian OWE supply chain firms are, in short, engaged with technology policy rather than energy deployment subsidy.

Aid is highly concentrated among a small number of large incumbents. Figure 1 illustrates both what the aid is for and where in the supply chain it lands, in each case measured by the number of cases. The left panel confirms the R&D dominance: 67 of the 75 cases in the sample fall under R&D and Innovation objectives, with other objectives present only at the margin. The right panel shows that aided firms are concentrated in component manufacturing and professional services, while installation, logistics and project development remain largely outside the aided population. In value terms, support services received close to EUR 100 million over the period, operations and maintenance around EUR 68 million, and component manufacturing approximately EUR 45 million; assembly, installation and project development received considerably less despite their importance to future capacity. The distribution across recipients is also far from even: the top five recipients capture roughly half of all aid value, and the top ten, approximately 27 percent of aided firms, account for close to three quarters of the total. The ten largest recipients are established industrial groups rather than start-ups. Siemens Industry Software, NV Bekaert SA, John Cockerill, ENGIE Laborelec and ZF Wind Power Antwerpen form the core, all with long histories of engagement with Belgian R&D programmes. A small group of six firms receives aid in four or more distinct calendar years, and these heavy repeat recipients alone capture more than half of all aid value in the sample. This raises an SME question as much as a concentration question: smaller firms may either receive awards below the TAM reporting thresholds or face higher practical barriers to accessing horizontal R&D schemes.

There is almost no specifically offshore wind aid for the supply chain. A textual analysis of the state aid case files underlying the TAM records shows that the most used legal vehicles, the federal R&D withholding tax exemption (SA.20326) and the successive versions of the Flemish O&O Kennisintensief scheme (SA.63753 and predecessors), are entirely sector-agnostic. Their eligibility criteria make no reference to offshore wind, renewable energy or the maritime sector. Aid reaches OWE supply chain firms as a consequence of their eligibility for horizontal programmes, not by sectoral design. The preferred sample captures firm-level TAM aid to supply chain firms above the reporting threshold. It excludes wind farm operators and the project-finance vehicles through which deployment support is typically organised. Direct OWE-targeted state aid in the Belgian context is essentially confined to the offshore renewable energy certificates scheme. Comparable deployment instruments, such as Contracts for Difference, may be approved under EU State aid rules, but they would not necessarily enter the firm-level TAM sample in the same way as direct awards. Where CfD support is awarded to wind-farm project companies or SPVs, it is deployment support for generation assets rather than aid targeted at offshore-wind supply-chain firms. Such instruments are therefore outside the preferred supply-chain sample by construction.

Recipient firms tend to grow after the aid year. Among the trackable cases, a clear majority show higher employment and value added three years after the aid was granted than in the year before it. The post-aid slope in event-time trajectories is roughly twice the pre-aid slope for both outcomes, with the visible inflection sitting between the aid year and the year that follows. Grant recipients show substantially stronger growth on both margins than recipients of tax-advantage cases; this rules out the simplest mechanical explanation for the association, namely that the withholding tax exemption mechanically tracks research headcount. Profitability, measured as return on assets, shows no sustained positive response in any cut of the data, consistent with recipient firms absorbing resources into expansion rather than converting them directly to margins. These patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that aid contributes to firm growth, but firms that anticipate a growth phase also have independent reasons to apply for R&D support at exactly that moment. The evidence is therefore descriptive only.

Policy recommendations: do not focus only on “more aid”. For firms, the results point to the importance of understanding and using the horizontal R&D instruments already available, especially where innovation projects can be clearly documented. For policymakers, the results point to three priorities: maintain a predictable support environment, make existing schemes easier for SMEs and specialised suppliers to access, and assess whether strategic bottlenecks in installation, port logistics and grid integration need instruments that sit alongside the horizontal R&D regime.