Arjan Hofmann

Exercise Windshield: Offshore wind's stress test

Exercise Windshield was presented as the first supply-chain cyber crisis exercise for Dutch offshore wind, designed to test whether the sector could coordinate under a severe, sophisticated attack scenario. The moderator framed the stakes with concrete energy-system numbers: The Netherlands currently has 4.7 gigawatts of installed offshore wind capacity in the Dutch North Sea, and over the next twenty-five years offshore wind is expected to grow enough to supply half of Dutch energy demand. In that context, the panel emphasized that taking out three gigawatts could be sufficient to cause a blackout not only in The Netherlands but in the Northwestern part of Europe, making offshore wind resilience a national-security issue rather than only an operational concern. Luke Fletcher of Bureau Veritas described how his team designed the exercise over roughly eight months, using crisis managers, hackers, incident responders, operational technology experts, and other specialists. The scenario placed participants in a hypothetical December 2025 environment where tensions between The Netherlands and a nation state had escalated for six to twelve months. In the exercise, that nation state had embedded an insider in a critical offshore wind supply-chain organization and launched an attack that blinded remote systems, affected wind-park sensors, and targeted original equipment manufacturers. This design was intended to be both realistic and engaging, forcing operators, suppliers, and public-sector stakeholders to coordinate under pressure. The public-sector role was explained by Jaap Noordhoek from the NCSC, who said the organization participated because three gigawatts of disrupted generation would affect national security, including digital national security. NCSC wanted to observe how organizations managed resilience and crisis processes, how reporting to NCSC worked, and how information could be shared with other NCSCs and energy-sector partners abroad. He also noted that although the new Cybersecurity Act was not yet enforced during the exercise, incident reporting obligations have since become relevant, making the practice valuable preparation. Nicoleta Dragan, speaking from the owner-operator perspective, highlighted that owners carry accountability for resilient operations while operators are “in the heat” when incidents happen. She said the exercise challenged assumptions about information sharing and made clear what NCSC could and could not provide, including indicators of compromise but not “supermen” services for the whole industry. Christoph Kroack of Siemens Energy stressed the supplier perspective: offshore wind assets run for around thirty years, and OEM involvement continues through long service and maintenance contracts. The panel’s practical conclusion from the excerpt was that trust, shared collaboration, known contact points, and repeated ecosystem-level practice are essential because no single party understands or controls the whole response alone.