Alongside its contribution to UK energy needs, the UK’s offshore wind sector is also bringing local economic benefits, in terms of investment and local job creation. To help track progress, the industry tracks UK content.
UK content is defined in Methodology for measuring the UK content of UK offshore wind farms (BVG Associates for Department of Energy and Climate Change, The Crown Estate and RenewableUK, May 2015, available online at https://bvgassociates.com/publications/).
UK content over lifetime
This chart shows a breakdown of UK content for a typical recent UK offshore wind farm. The overall UK content is 40% of undiscounted lifetime spend. The key contributions typically are:
- Operations, maintenance and service, where much of the activity is close to the wind farm site,
- Installation and commissioning, where the UK has several leading marine contractors and equipment suppliers, and
- Turbine, where most blades and some towers are supplied from the UK.