Inch Cape: Building the wind farm many said couldn't be built

Okay, Stephen.

Wel- welcome to Leith Port.

This is where it's all happening at the moment in relation to Inch Cape.

Um, and it's a great day to be here and finally get to see all the hard years of work that's gone into getting the project to this point anyway.

Thanks for having me, for starters.

I mean, we're standing here and we're looking at, I can't count them, but I think there's about a dozen or more-

18

... 18.

There you go

... 18 jackets.

Jackets in front of us, huge yellow monsters on the skyline of Edinburgh.

Jackets aren't, uh, aren't as common now in offshore wind, but on Inch Cape they are.

What, what was the decision behind bringing in jackets on Inch Cape?

Yeah, so, um, a couple of cond- couple of main reasons in terms of jackets on Inch Cape, really first one was down to, uh, ground conditions.

So maybe just look at Inch Cape at a high level, uh, we have 72 turbines, so 54 of those are the monopiles, which you just missed maybe from about four, four weeks ago, the last shipment of monopiles went out there, and talk about them in a second.

Um, so 54 monopiles and 18 jackets.

Um, and the rationale, two main reasons, water depths and also just site conditions at the vary, uh, across the site vary, um, a lot, um, and i- just in terms of the, the, the strength of the, the seabed.

So in certain areas we felt that, um, it was more, uh, jackets were a better overall solution.

The jackets here, obviously you contracted in Asia.

Yeah.

Um, what was that scope like? How did that work out with the fabricator? Jackets aren't the sh- most straightforward a thing to fabricate-

Mm-hmm

... and over the years have always presented problems on projects.

But here it appears certainly to the naked eye, you've got all your jackets here ready, and they all look ready to go in.

Yeah, so in terms of the fabrication of all of the foundations, um, we had three main fabricators.