Insight into Offshore Wind Industry for Cumbria Supply Chain
Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership in conjunction with the Offshore Energy Alliance hosted a visit to Ørsted’s West Coast Hub at Barrow to gain an understanding of the growing offshore industry and the potential supply chain opportunities.
Ørsted provided an overview of their facility which provides Operations & Maintenance (O&M) support to 5 separate offshore wind farms off the Furness coast line with a total of 465 turbines. Between the ports of Barrow and Workington, Cumbria is the O&M base to 13% of the UK’s current operational offshore capacity. UK Capacity will expand substantially by the end of the decade with another 3.5GW coming to the Irish Sea through the new Mona, Morgan and Morecambe developments. Promoting Cumbria as a centre of excellence for offshore O&M is a key part of our CLEP Clean Energy Strategy.
A full commitment of 13 companies visited, some already supplying the industry as well as companies interested in diversifying into offshore and spanning a wide range of manufacturing and service businesses. The companies attending were; James Walker, Abaris, Industrial Solutions Hub, Astec Precision, McMenon Engineering, HIEX, Ardent Safety, SCS Logistics, Deltawaite, PDL Solutions, Delkia, HiDef Surveying, Allan Webb Ltd.
Overall, Orsted provided a valuable insight into the operations at their facility and we agreed a follow on event later in the year to focus on supply chain innovation that could support the industry. We will also continue to build the network of companies interested in supporting the industry.
www.offshoreenergyalliance.co.uk links developers, suppliers and local growth agencies to promote the development of the offshore industry across the North West England and North Wales. See the website or contact us directly at CLEP if your company is interested.
We are very grateful to the Orsted team for hosting the visit, to Stuart Klosinski for his support and we look forward to continued engagement with the Offshore Energy Alliance to promote offshore wind and related industries.