NORTH East England has a proven track record of energy innovation in the exploitation of fossil fuels and is now leading the world in the development of low carbon generation, helping the UK to meet its own energy targets and secure future supplies.
Investment in offshore wind generating capacity alone, targeted at generating a quarter of the UK’s electricity needs, is forecast to be around £100bn and could create up to 70,000 jobs by 2020. With wave and tidal technology, the region’s expertise in working in the offshore environment bodes well for future business opportunities.
As a key driver of the national agenda, Narec – the New and Renewable Energy Centre at Blyth – is creating a world-leading technology advancement hub for the offshore renewables industry in North East England, working with global turbine, blade, electrical infrastructure manufacturers, project and device developers on their large turbine, blade and associated equipment development programmes.
Our latest proposals to build on existing testing and R&D capabilities have received investment from national Government, regional development agency One North East and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and are focused on improving the productivity of new technologies by addressing the reliability of technology, installation methods and O&M challenges.
With this support, Narec will continue to attract investment into the region as companies cluster around these world-leading ‘risk mitigation’ facilities and centres of expertise to enhance their new development programmes.
Creating a National Centre for Renewable Energy, recent investment and future proposals at Narec include:
A new £15m facility for testing offshore turbine blades of up to 100m in length. The new advanced facility will provide an independent and confidential environment to accelerate the development of new blade designs before they are taken offshore. It will be the largest of its type in the world and is jointly funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Energy and Climate Change (£11.5m) and Regional Development Agency One North East (£3.5m).
Narec was also awarded an £18.5m grant by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to fund an offshore wind test site at Narec in Blyth, Northumberland. The facility will be unique in global R&D terms, enabling manufacturers and wind farm developers to identify best practice approaches across the supply chain for the development, deployment and O&M of new turbine technologies, which will be most pertinent to the Crown Estate Round 3 Programme.
Funding for the build of a major turbine component and drive train testing rig has the support of the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) and One North East (ONE). These plans, to design the world’s largest open access offshore wind turbine drive train test rig, were announced by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) in February 2010. The test rig design specification is a result of nearly two years of engineering development and industry consultation by Narec and ETI. ONE will invest £10m in the building to house the rig.
This month, Narec will officially open a new 27m high training facility – the UK’s first wind turbine training tower, recently installed at Narec in Blyth, Northumberland. The training tower is the result of a collaborative training partnership, backed by regional development Agency, One North East, between Northumberland College, Mainstream Renewable Power and Narec. It is an open access facility, designed to allow education and training providers to deliver academic and industrial training programmes for technicians working in the wind industry and at height, both onshore and offshore. This new facility will ensure the UK gets the maximum economic benefit from the new offshore wind industry in terms of future jobs across the supply chain with the potential to create thousands of jobs for the region.
In July 2009 £10m of funding was granted by the Strategic Investment Fund (SIF) for Project Nautilus – a rotary test rig – with supporting infrastructure, software modelling capability and technical expertise to satisfy the growing demand from industry for specialist marine renewables drive train development. Nautilus will de-risk in-field activities by allowing Narec to perform certification activities, reliability and performance appraisal of new devices, through accelerated lifetime testing at the Narec Marine Test Facility in Blyth, Northumberland. This open access facility will allow developers to test and improve the reliability of their devices throughout the development process from medium scale prototypes through to full-scale commercial devices, at significantly lower cost and risk in comparison to sea testing.
