UK steel foundry and fabricator Sheffield Forgemasters is working with the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership (OWGP), securing funding and support to help it join the UK offshore wind supply chain.
The company has secured consultancy support via the OWGP WEST programme, providing market assessments, feedback, recommendations of next steps and action plans for further support.
Sheffield Forgemasters has also successfully bid for £40,000 of funding via the OWGP Cross-Sector Support Competition, which aims to attract cross-sector engagement and enable more UK companies to join the sector.
Business development manager Dominic Ashmore said: “It is clear to us that Sheffield Forgemasters has a significant level of capabilities and skills from its many years of work in offshore oil and gas and power generation sectors to become a key contributor to the development of offshore wind power.”
Establishing Sheffield Forgemasters in the offshore wind market supply chain would potentially creating upwards of 80 jobs directly with the company and more than 100 indirectly in the local community and supply chain, said Ashmore.
He added: “These are early days for this sector and the OWGP WEST programme will help us to identify the current state of the market, to analyse projects and possibilities and to look at regional offshore wind generation targets.
“There are certain elements of manufacture for the offshore wind market which look readily transferrable from the oil and gas work that we have done, but there are still numerous transitions that may need to be made, in the shift from large scale bespoke products to repeat manufacturing cycles for example.”
Sheffield Forgemasters, one of 12 companies UK to tap into the £1.3m OWGP fund, manufactures for numerous sectors including offshore oil and gas, power generation, materials processing, civil nuclear and defence industries and is working to support the Government’s net zero carbon agenda.
