Harland & Wolff has had to reinvent itself radically over the last two decades

THE GHOST of the Titanictends to obscure the fact that Harland & Wolff has been around for 150 years, that it built more than 1,700 ships and was an acknowledged world leader in that industry for a long time.

The company’s renewable sales manager, Lawrence Cobain, concedes that it once tended to be circumspect about the ill-fated White Star liner, but acknowledges that, these days, it can be a useful calling card.

The company, now part of Norwegian group Fred Olsen, still occupies part of Belfast’s docks and its distinctive cranes, dubbed Samson and Goliath, can be spotted from most parts of the city. The yard has had to reinvent itself radically over the last two decades. In its heyday, in the 1930s, it employed 37,000 people; by the 1980s that fell to about 5,000.

These days is has a core staff of 160, though there are about 500 on site at the moment. Building ships is no longer part of its business as that industry has shifted east, but it carry out repairs and recently reported that this element of its operations had had a healthy start to the year.

With shipbuilding a thing of the past, the company is focused on marine adventures of another kind these days. For a long time, it has been building offshore installations of various kinds. But in recent years it has been expanding into renewable energy and, specifically, offshore wind farms, where it has a growing portfolio of projects.

It’s a business that financial director Con O’Neill says offers a viable future to Harland & Wolff Heavy Industries.

The work essentially involves assembling the turbines that are familiar to most people. The structures themselves consist of the blades, the turbine element that generates the electricity, and the columns and bases that support them. The company then ships them to the site and installs them using specially adapted vessels.

Offshore turbines are getting bigger. Danish group Vestas, one of the leading developers and suppliers has come up with a turbine capable of generating seven mega watts (MW) of electricity – enough to supply about 7,000 households at full capacity (wind farms produce power around one-third of the time). Modern onshore turbines generate about 2MW. The 7MW turbine blades have a sweep three times the size of Wembley Stadium.

Harland & Wolff assembles 3MW turbines for Vestas, and has installed 60 of them at the Robin Rigg wind farm off the Dumfries and Galloway coast in Scotland, which is operated by global energy business Eon.

The company has done similar work for other big players, such as Swedish utility Vattenfall, and is carving a niche as a partner both for the energy companies and the technology developers.

There’s no doubt that it’s heavy engineering. Turbine blades, which can be seen lined up in neat rows waiting for assembly, weigh 25 tonnes.

Last year, the works won a contract from Siemens to build structures that will house substations for the Gwynt Y Mor wind farm off the Welsh coast. It is currently working on these structures. They will house the substation equipment, including high-voltage switch gear and transformers, which takes the electricity generated at the farm and then transmits it to a similar station on land, from where it enters the distribution network.

Much of what is assembled in Belfast travels east to the British coast.

The UK government has a stated ambition of becoming a world leader in offshore wind development. Its energy and climate change minister of state, Charles Hendry, recently wrote in a trade publication that it already has 1.3 gigawatts (1,300MW) installed, and the Crown Estate has awarded development rights for a further 50 gigawatts.

O’Neill argues that there is a huge opportunity for both Britain and Ireland to create wealth and employment by cashing in on these developments. He points out that, given their location in the north Atlantic, the two islands have a “huge” wind resource.

However, he says that, while the UK has grabbed this with both hands, the Republic needs to catch up.

Brian Britton, one of the backers behind the Oriel wind farm proposal, east of Dundalk Bay in Co Louth, and spokesman for the National Offshore Wind association, agrees.

Britton produces a map showing that Ireland, Scotland and a swathe of the North Sea have the best wind resources anywhere in Europe. But a case of “regulatory disconnect” is preventing this potential from being realised, he says.

A number of large-scale projects, including electricity and gas firm SSE’s lease for 200 turbines on the Arklow Bank, and Codling Wind Park’s proposals for 220 turbines, are not in the current Gate Three round of licensing offers for wind energy projects. Projects with a capacity of more than 2,600MW are in planning, but there is room for another 4,000. This he says would represent an investment of €8 billion and 50,000 jobs.

Britton says that a recent paper by the Economic and Social Research Institute economist, John Fitzgerald, saying that offshore wind is too expensive, and that onshore projects would easily cater for Irish renewable energy targets, is wrong.

He argues that it takes the short-term view, and that Ireland could become a net exporter of energy if its wind resources were harnessed properly. Doing this would also help secure energy supplies for the future, and cut dependence on expensive, mainly imported, fossil fuels.

“We can’t rely on multi-nationals to do our developing for us forever, we have to do things for ourselves,” he says.