H&W changes course

Belfast’s Harland & Wolff shipyard has been undergoing a quiet revolution bringing with it the promise of new prosperity. The latest contract the yard has landed is to fabricate and assemble components for an offshore wind farm and then dispatch the units to the English coast.

The sections of the 60-turbine facility are so massive that Samson, one of H&W’s heavy-lift gantry cranes, is needed to load them on board a special delivery ship. The ship, Resolution, ferries them once a week across to Cumbria where the supports are being embedded in the seabed and the turbines placed on top. The contract is believed to be worth around £1m and, although the Cumbrian project is chiefly an assembly job, H&W hope to get further up the food chain into the manufacturing end.

Renewable energy is one of the areas into which H&W Heavy Industries, as the company is now known, has diversified now the days of major shipbuilding are over. H&W, owned by Olsen Energy of Norway, is an engineering and fabrication company with a core workforce of just 100 and a much reduced operational area.