Riggers banking on windfarms to expand
A SPECIALIST rigging company, established by the Norwegians to cash in on Teesside skills in the off- and on-shore energy industries, has racked up more than £1.6m of business in its first year.
STS Resources and Technology at Riverside Park said it was now banking on expansion in UK windfarms to drive the next stage of growth - including setting up its own training centre for industrial rope access techniques, pioneered by parent company STS Grupper. The Norwegian group holds the patent for Habitat and Hans technology that has revolutionised maintenance and non-destructive testing techniques across all sectors of industry.
Seventy-five Teesside staff are employed on contract in Norway, while a further 50 have been sub-contracted to the parent group.
“The Norwegians have a very large country and a very small skills base, said Marc Draco, a consultant working with STS R&T. “They realised there was a massive skills resource in the north of England and Teesside is very close to Norway. They wanted a good level of skilled, highly motivated guys that they could not get in Norway.”
He said the employment potential was ‘tremendous’ and there was no shortage of people willing to apply.
“If anything we are fighting them away from the door. The working conditions are excellent and they’re paid a king’s ransom - although they work for it.”
Non destructive testing techniques are widely used in industry to identify faults without stripping down equipment. It is typically used in the aerospace industry to locate cracks in wings caused by stresses.
A natural extension of the work is in wind farm technology, which the company had identified as being a growth area with more than half a dozen offshore locations already earmarked along the North-east coast, said Mr Draco.
Meanwhile, Habitat and Hans has been licensed to other end users.
'Habitat throws a protective cloak around site maintenance in areas where safety requirements would normally make it impossible, while Hans is an automatic shut down system which detects the presence of explosive gases.'
