A £100m fund to support UK businesses in the offshore wind sector has been launched by the Offshore Wind Industry Council (OWIC) in a bid to help the UK capitalise on “huge opportunities” for expected rapid global growth over the next decade. Announced yesterday, the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership (OWGP) is a 10-year programme aimed at helping supply chain companies to boost their competitiveness worldwide, offering funding for innovation programmes and expert advice on how to scale up manufacturing and commercialisation efforts, OWIC said.
Business Green 25th June 2019 read more »
The Finance Secretary has told MSPs he is “cautiously optimistic” the BiFab fabrication yard in Fife will secure vital contracts. With BiFab’s yards in Methil and Burntisland currently mothballed, unions are campaigning to secure work on a £2bn offshore wind farm off Fife. It is feared the contract could go to Indonesia. Derek Mackay said he was disappointed supply chain benefits had not materialised from the wind farm. Giving evidence to Holyrood’s economy and energy committee, he said the Scottish government was now exploring legal routes that would compel companies to invest in Scotland. BiFab, an engineering firm, builds large-scale equipment for the offshore oil and gas industry, as well as platforms for offshore wind turbines and tidal generators. The company previously had a core workforce of 400 and a further 1,000 contractors. It was thought that the bulk of those jobs would be saved when DF Barnes took over in April last year. However, in November last year, BiFab suffered cash flow problems linked to a contract for the Beatrice offshore wind farm in the Moray Firth. Now unions are hoping to secure other work in a bid to save jobs.
BBC 25th June 2019 read more »
Energy Voice 26th June 2019 read more »
The world’s biggest wind turbine is to undergo UK testing before it enters production in 2021. GE Renewable Energy’s Haliade-X 12 megawatt (MW) nacelle is due to be transported from its production facilities in Saint-Nazaire and Cherbourg in France to ORE Catapult’s testing facilities in Blyth in the North East of England. The Haliade-X turbine blade will undergo a program that will replicate real-world operational conditions to reduce the time required to validate performance and reliability.
Energy Voice 26th June 2019 read more »
The Scottish government is exploring legal options to force companies building offshore wind farms to use local suppliers. Derek Mackay, the finance minister, told the economy, energy and fair work committee at Holyrood that he wanted to “incentivise better behaviour” from renewable energy developers. Unions have raised concerns in recent months as large-scale manufacturing contracts for Scottish projects have been awarded to overseas bidders. Mr Mackay said that government officials were looking at ways to use the powers of the Crown Estate Scotland, as well as the decommissioning agreements which have to be signed for developments. Mr Mackay, 41, said that a mechanism to impose conditions on developers existed within the contracts-for-difference scheme, which offers a subsidy for power generation, but that Westminster had chosen not to use it. With regard to Crown Estate Scotland, Mr Mackay said that the Scottish government was looking into whether agreements for leasing parts of the seabed could be adapted to include a commitment around using domestic suppliers. “Waiting on a voluntary basis for companies to do the right thing has not been successful,” Mr Mackay said. “If the incentives are not working you have to look at what is the big stick.”
Times 26th June 2019 read more »
EDF Renewables UK bought the 450MW Neart na Gaoithe in May 2018 from the developer Mainstream Renewable Power. Mainstream was the idea of Eddie O’Connor, an Irish engineer who first worked for the state-owned Electricity Supply Board of Ireland and then was chief executive of the Republic’s Bord na Móna, which commercially exploited its extensive peatlands. In 1997 he founded Airtricity, one of the earliest commercial onshore wind power development enterprises. In 2008 he sold it to SSE, the privatised Scottish energy utility born out of the postwar North of Scotland Hydro Board. Mr O’Connor sank his gains from that deal into launching Mainstream and has since taken his prowess in taking wind farm prospects on or offshore to the brink of operational development all over the world. He has one other massive vision. He and his colleagues described it, in a speech to the Energy Institute, University College Dublin, in February last year. It is for a pan-European energy generation and supply system, powered by wind in the north of the Continent and solar around the Mediterranean Basin. Delivery would be by a Europe-wide supergrid, facilitated by yet-to-be-built supernode technology that transforms AC electricity to DC and distributes greener energy to every corner of the Continent. He expects Britain to participate, Brexit or no Brexit. I couldn’t find any sign of this kind of blue-sky thinking in the Royal Society report. But, there again, its two-year inquiry took only Scotland as its canvas.A Scotland where leading politicians bemoan the failure to secure work for Bifab, wrangle over who’s to blame, and — to judge by yesterday’s encounter between Derek Mackay, the economy minister, and MSPs on Holyrood’s energy, economy and fair work committee — everything comes back to who abides by European Union state aid rules and who flouts them. That’s not a strategy. That’s a blame game. Mr O’Connor’s big idea may be a dream too far, but, as he himself says, he’s merely trying to provide “an engineering solution to a political challenge”. I’ll take that over political histrionics any day.
Times 26th June 2019 read more »
ScottishPower Renewables installs first turbine at East Anglia ONE offshore wind farm.
NS Energy 26th June 2019 read more »
