Call it a case of old meets new. Shipyards, which sustain one of the world’s oldest industries are seeing new business these from a modern day technology, marine renewable energy.
As Renewable Energy World reports, shipyards are serving as a home to production of components necessary for offshore wind and hydrokinetic projects. For example, the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast are completing the steel foundations for 60 Vestas offshore wind turbins, and have won a contract for “jackets” for an offshore transformer platform that will be part of another wind farm. The shipyard also constructed the Sea Gen turbine by Marine Current Turbines, which we last posted about here.
UK shipyards aren’t the only beneficiaries of this new work, though. Orecon, a UK company, just signed a contract with a shipyard in Portugal to build Orecon’s 1.5MW MRC wave energy devices for the Portuguese market.
Of course, other industries are benefiting from offshore wind and hydrokinetic projects. Fishing fleets are gaining employment from running maintenance crews and survey teams out to the construction sites, while companies that provide under sea cabling and software for risk assessment and project design are also getting a bump.
In my view, the United States hasn’t yet fully recognized the potential for marine renewables to drive industry in non-energy sectors. Maybe articles like these from overseas will offer a reminder.
My name is Carolyn Elefant, owner of the Law Offices of Carolyn Elefant in Washington D.C. and I do FERC Fights. Whether a matter requires an appeal of a FERC ruling in federal circuit court, a request for rehearing, a vigorous defense in an enforcement action, the pursuit of a refund or general protection of interests in a FERC proceeding, I act as a tenacious, thorough and persistent advocate for my clients.
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A lot of money is being poured into wind turbine technology in the UK. It’s the windiest country in Europe (apparently) and a lot of off-shore wind farms are being built.
It’s a big, positive step for the UK where renewable power is only a tiny percentage of our electricity generation. Solar is pretty much non-existant, we’re a long way behind most other nations on hydro-electricity generation and, despite being one of the early adopters on wind turbines from back in the 1980s, we’ve been lagging behind in more recent years.
Building off-shore wind turbines is going to be a big business here in the UK for the next few years – and hopefully for a very long time to come.