Shifting energies elsewhere
As British wind farms rise, oil and gas workers are finding new purposes professionally
WICK, Scotland — The pilot of the nearly 80-foot work boat gunned its powerful engines, pinning the bow against the base of a towering wind turbine in the smooth North Sea. Three men in yellow and orange outfits stepped onto metal rungs and started slowly scaling the nearly 300-foot structure, past the huge blades that help send electricity to Scotland.
It was a regular workday for these employees and contractors of a Scottish utility, SSE, and its partners, which operate the vast Beatrice wind farm off the northern tip of Britain.
Their job is to go from turbine to turbine — Beatrice has 84 arrayed over 50 square miles of water — performing maintenance of the powerful machines. Teams can usually service two or three in a day.
It’s grueling work — up to 12 hours a day on the water — but it has its rewards.
David Larter, one of the men who climbed the tower, showed a video he had made on his phone while eating lunch one day from a perch high above the North Sea: a minke whale, gently rolling through the water below the tower.
“We were quite lucky that day,” he said. Like other people around Wick, a former fishing port where the wind farm’s operations are based, Larter also considers himself fortunate to have signed onto a business that is growing as Europe seeks to replace oil and gas, whose production has been a mainstay of this part of Scotland, with cleaner energy.
Across the globe, governments and developers are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into offshore wind farms like Beatrice to meet climate change goals.
These initiatives are attractive to investors and lawmakers because they produce enormous amounts of clean energy and can be placed far enough from shore that they are largely out of sight.
Britain is already generating more than 10% of its electricity from wind at sea, and on some gusty days, wind produces more than half. As energy security becomes a critical issue in wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the country aspires to nearly quadruple offshore capacity over the next decade.
The marine wind industry, while growing fast, is still in its infancy and produces only a small fraction of the energy content of the oil and gas extracted from the British North Sea. And because of the greater ability to automate the operation of maritime facilities, it is uncertain if they will fully replace the declining number of jobs in oil and gas.
Still, the changes underway in this region of Scotland could mean there is still a future for the people who work in oil and gas and the communities that depend on it.
Many people who honed their skills on the offshore oil platforms that dot the waters off Scotland find it relatively easy to switch to the wind industry.
“What we have got is a very ambidextrous community that will turn their hand to anything that needs doing,” said Willie Watt, a retired oil services executive and former chair of the Wick Harbor Authority board.
Among those who made the switch is Alan Paul, a Wick native who spent 28 years in the oil business and now manages Beatrice’s control room at the harbor’s edge. It is where technicians monitor activities out at the turbines, using cameras mounted on equipment and checking the giant machines’ performance on screens.
Part of what drew Paul to wind was a desire to escape the need to spend weeks away from home. He said those strains had contributed to the collapse of his first marriage. He has since remarried.
“It meant I could have my own home every night,” he said of joining Beatrice in 2017.