24 January 2025

You’ve got to be in it to win it

Jacqui Murray, HVM Catapult Director of South Wales, explains why 2025 is an important year for Welsh manufacturers.

In ten years’ time, 260 floating offshore wind turbines will be anchored in the Celtic Sea.

They won’t be visible to my son and his mates surfing in Porthcawl or my mum and dad tucking into fish and chips on holiday in Tenby, but they will be there, powering more than four million homes and helping the UK government achieve its vision of fully decarbonised electricity generation.

Clean energy is not the only prize, however. Last year’s Celtic Sea Blueprint report said the new floating wind farms could create more than 5,000 new jobs and deliver a £1.4bn boost to the Welsh economy. This is where I believe we should be leveraging Wales’ strengths.

Wales naturally lends itself to the opportunity, with its manufacturing base and heavy industry heritage, but this is not a given. It will come from capturing the value in the supply chain, secured from an orderbook that is reinforced by technology leadership and the right skills.

New floating wind farms could create more than 5,000 new jobs and deliver a £1.4bn boost to the Welsh economy.

The High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult and Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult are leading South Wales’ industrial restructuring, helping transform the country’s traditional industries into a new net zero cluster that can accelerate technology development at scale through disruptive technologies and optimised factories.

Utilising our combined strengths in electrical systems and cables, O&M technologies and robotic platforms, we are helping businesses immersed in heavy industry transition to offshore wind, providing new opportunities alongside the changes we are seeing at the Port Talbot steelworks. Together we will turn existing capabilities into world-leading innovations for next generation turbine programmes in areas such as industrialised foundations and substructures, steel towers and high-power semiconductors.

While the opportunity for Welsh manufacturers is enormous, the landscape is uncertain, with significant design decisions to be made. The industry will look a lot clearer later this year when the Crown Estate announces which developers will be leasing areas of the Celtic Sea, but there is no time to waste.

We need to act now.

You don’t need to be working in offshore wind at this moment to take a slice of the £1.4bn prize, but you do need to recognise the opportunity on offer and, most importantly, that timing is both key and short.

The winners in Wales’ floating offshore wind supply chain will be the bold manufacturers, the ones who seek first mover advantage in this emerging sector. There is a huge opportunity for manufacturers new to offshore wind – to succeed they will need to be able to demonstrate capability, capacity, resilient supply lines, strong products and high productivity.

Floating offshore wind presents a big challenge, but the UK has a natural advantage as an island with deep sea ports and a strong engineering design and innovation tradition. It needs a team approach, with governments, industry and R&D having a critical role to play.

This will build the much needed supply chain capacity from Wales’ manufacturing base and the technology scale-up solutions from HVM Catapult and ORE Catapult. It will encourage a renewed push by skills providers to deliver the pipeline of talent and the necessary funding from private investment.

Critically, we require the infrastructure.

Delivering UK manufacturing supply chain content for floating offshore wind in the Celtic Sea will be almost entirely dependent on local ports where the supply chain will come together – whether to fabricate or assemble floaters that have been manufactured locally.

Currently no Celtic Sea ports have the required capability or capacity and the lead time associated with developing such capabilities is long and uncertain. We urge certainty to encourage Welsh businesses to invest to achieve success.

It needs a team approach, with governments, industry and R&D having a critical role to play.

With the right conditions, Wales can help the UK become a global leader in wind technology for decades to come. In my experience, when Wales is winning, UK manufacturing is thriving.

Taking those first steps in 2025 will require businesses to be brave. Success will come by moving early, failing fast and getting to market first. Our network is here to help.

Big challenges require us to think bigger and take a bold approach. With the right operating conditions and collaborative partnerships, there is a huge prize on offer.

This article was first published in Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult’s ReEnergise magazine.

Authors

Theme
National and global challenges Net zero
Sector
Energy Renewables
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