How steel girders hammered into field help scientists to improve offshore wind turbines

THEY HAVE been catching the eye of passing motorists in recent months.

Drivers on the B1242 coastal road in East Yorkshire will have spotted the large steel structures in a field at Cowden, near Aldbrough.

The steel piles are helping researchers from Oxford University work out how to improve installing offshore wind turbines in deeper water, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Danish energy firm Ørsted.

Two dozen have been driven up to 32ft into the ground, some using hammers suspended from a crane. They are left to settle for two months before being tested to replicate the stresses that offshore turbine foundations undergo as they are battered by wind and waves.

Ørsted said the insights from the pile load- testing project would “help further limit potential environmental impact of next- generation turbines and minimise the materials required for offshore piles”.

They would also allow for installations in deeper water, meaning wind farms could be located further offshore.

Ørsted has just completed the building of the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Hornsea One, 75 miles off the Yorkshire coast, and is building a second, with two more in the pipeline.

The project is expected to run until early 2021, at which point the land will be reinstated.

Ørsted, which also has the Westermost Rough wind farm off Withernsea, said the tests would not require any further piling work and would not generate noise beyond the site.

The collaboration between the energy firm and university started in 2018.

At the time Byron Byrne, professor of engineering science at the University of Oxford, said: “This exciting new phase of collaboration with Ørsted will put the next generation of offshore wind farms on more secure and cost- effective foundations through robust design methods for cyclic loading.

“This will be challenging but essential if the cost of offshore wind energy is to be further reduced.”

The Government has committed to 40GW of installed offshore capacity by 2030.

So far around 12GW has been built.