Armada’s pivotal role in the construction of the Westermost Rough offshore wind farm

Westermost Rough is an important offshore wind farm located in the North Sea, 8km off the Holderness Coast and 25km north of the Humber Estuary.

The wind farm covers a total area of 32 square kilometres, within which are sited 35 huge Siemens 6MW wind turbines. In total, Westermost Rough generates enough electricity to power 210,000 homes.

When the site was being constructed, the operators needed the help of Armada Engineering for a critical part of the process, as Managing Director Joff Collins explains:

“Each of these turbine towers has a height of 177 metres. To put it in context, that is higher than the Humber Bridge.

“These huge towers were laid on barges in order to be transported to the site from Newcastle. Armada Engineering was brought in to design and build the hydraulic upending buckets that were needed to lift these massive structures upright so that they could be placed in position.

“This was the very first time that hydraulics had been used in this way on a windfarm construction project of this scale.

“This was a very tough engineering challenge. All the equipment was designed by our team, then built and tested at our facility in Cornwall before being taken to the construction site.

“Westermost Rough is an excellent example of how our unique expertise in hydraulics continues to find new applications in the marine industry and how our skilled team of engineers is capable of tackling projects of any size and scale.”