Thulesen Dahl in Transport Today: drop the toasts and get to work

This is a quote story. The original story can be read in the October issue of Transport Today.

Danish commercial ports play a crucial role in facilitating Denmark's towering ambitions in the offshore wind sector.

But ports face some monumental challenges in this regard that must and must be solved - quickly. Otherwise, ports will find it difficult to contribute all they can to the green transition.

This is the message from Port of Aalborg's director, Kristian Thulesen Dahl, who after a long career as a top politician in the Danish People's Party took over the helm of the Limfjord port this summer.

The challenges relate to the framework conditions of ports; in order to handle and ship the ever-growing components used in the construction of offshore wind turbines, ports need to invest heavily in their infrastructure. This means radical changes to ports: bigger cranes, more expensive foundations for land areas, increased draught at the quay and in the shipping channel. It will be so expensive that it is unrealistic to expect the ports to finance it on their own, says Kristian Thulesen Dahl. The state must assist the ports financially to make it work - and it must all be part of a single, overall national strategy for the role of commercial ports in the wind turbine adventure.

The port director urges his former colleagues at Christiansborg to take action immediately and draw up such a national strategy - it is not only Denmark's important role in the green transition, but also Danish jobs that are potentially at stake, Thulesen Dahl points out. Because if the right conditions for the ports are not in place, offshore wind turbines will increasingly be produced abroad, and that must not happen, he states.