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Strategic report
OCU Group | Annual report and financial statements 2025
Governance
Financial statements
Market opportunity
Energy Transition market
UK non-regulated energy transition market outlook
Wind power (onshore & offshore cabling)
Wind already contributes over 80TWh/year of UK electricity, and the Energy Act 2023 continues to streamline grid integration – ensuring sustained demand for OCU Group’s capabilities as the UK’s wind market expands towards 2030. Battery energy storage systems (BESS) Energy storage is scaling up dramatically to support renewable integration. The UK currently has ~2.1GW of operational battery storage (BESS) out of ~4.7GW total storage including pumped hydro. Analysts project utility-scale BESS will surge to around 24GW by 2030, attracting £15–20bn in investment. In fact, the government’s ambitious target is ~30GW of total storage by 2030 (covering batteries, hydro, and other technologies). Policies are facilitating this growth: planning size limits for batteries have been lifted, and the National Energy System Operator forecasts significant storage needs to reach a ~50%+ renewables share by 2030. 2024 saw a 64% increase in storage capacity (7.4GW added) with BESS technology leading the way. This market will continue to grow with Long Duration Energy Storage being the next step towards balancing renewable generation. This scale-up of BESS – providing grid balancing, frequency response, and peak shifting – is crucial to the energy transition. It also represents a fast-growing market for OCU’s services in battery storage program delivery and network integration.
The UK’s wind power capacity, an essential contributor to its clean energy goals, reached over 30GW in 2024 – comprising 15.5GW of onshore wind and 14.8GW of offshore wind – making the UK a world leader in offshore generation. Significant expansion is underway, with the UK Government aiming to roughly double onshore wind capacity by 2030 (~30GW nationwide) and to increase offshore wind to 43–50GW (including 5GW of floating wind), underpinned by annual Contracts for Difference auctions and supply chain investments. While OCU Group does not participate in the offshore wind construction market given its risk profile, we play a key role in enabling offshore projects through our specialist horizontal directional drilling (HDD) services. These allow the landing of offshore cabling and onshore connection points via underground ducting, preserving sensitive shorelines by avoiding surface disruption from land to seabed. In the onshore wind sector, OCU Group actively supports the continued scale-up of UK capacity, particularly in Scotland, and is well positioned to do the same in England following the lifting of moratorium in July 2024. We provide critical infrastructure services including construction, grid connection, HDD, and maintenance.
The UK’s non-regulated energy transition market, including, inter alia , onshore/offshore wind, solar PV, battery storage, synchronous condensers, EV infrastructure, and green hydrogen, is experiencing unprecedented growth. Supportive government policies (e.g. Energy Act 2023, Net Zero Strategy, Clean Power 2030) and private funding (e.g. the National Wealth Fund and GB Energy) are triggering investment across these technologies, creating a significant and expanding addressable market for OCU. The UK is committed to a fully decarbonised power system by 2030, with interim 2030 targets and ambitions backing accelerated deployment today.
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