News Article

Dr Richard Court, Technology Specialist for Wind and Renewables at the New and Renewable Energy Centre (NaREC) in North East England, offers an insight into the technological and supply chain challenges faced by the offshore wind industry, and outlines the measures which are being taken to help overcome them in the UK.

While construction of Round 1 and Round 2 farms steadily continues close to our shores with sites typically deploying two and three megawatt machines, the ambitions for Round 3 are far greater and require a major rethink of the technology used to get there.

The vast remote sites envisaged will require much bigger machines which must be able to cope with the harsh offshore environment.  Failure onshore can be costly, but failure on such scale at sea is simply unthinkable.

To date, offshore turbines have been based upon onshore turbine technology adapted and scaled-up of the offshore environment. Reliability and performance of these turbines has therefore been based on their operation onshore.   

The ability of industry to deliver machines upwards of 5MW in such numbers – NaREC estimates 5000 turbines could be required – requires a rapid change in the wind industry as the focus of technology development and supply chain support shifts from onshore farms to the offshore environment.

A new approach to develop reliable offshore wind which is capable of contributing up to 30% of the UK’s energy supply is required.  This, in addition to efforts to prepare and support the manufacturing and supply and operations base that will be needed to accelerate the offshore industry,

As developers return to their drawing boards it is imperative that industry recognises the need to work with independent centres of expertise like NaREC, and engages leading minds in the academic world to bring research forward to market.  NaREC is already supporting wind turbine manufacturers around the world in the testing and development of their next generation wind turbine blades, and is working with the leading players in the Supergen Consortium to encourage more collaboration.

The pace and efficiency of installation that will be required to meet 2020 targets means that the industry cannot afford to wait for turbines to prove themselves in service.  For this reason, NaREC is working on plans to develop the world’s largest independent wind energy R&D Campus at Blyth, Northumberland.

The proposals have been designed to prepare the industry for major growth in very large capacity turbines – giving manufacturers the expertise and resource to develop and test new systems, and the supply chain the opportunity to adapt to bigger, more challenging technology.

The new campus would provide the European wind industry with a much needed fully independent and confidential platform for developing wind turbines above and beyond the current 5MW benchmark, and allow manufacturers to test and develop whole ‘power systems’ for offshore technology, including complete nacelles, in realistic in-field conditions.

North East England is ideally placed to capitalise on offshore wind - over 800 turbines to be potentially deployed in the North Sea site alone 150km off the North East coast – and the two other North Sea sites announced could easily be supplied and serviced from our engineering bases on the banks of the rivers Blyth, Tyne, Wear and Tees.