Danish Offshore Wind Company Opens UK Office

Danish offshore wind energy service provider All NRG has opened its first office in the UK. From its new base at the Port of Grimsby, off the Humber Estuary in North England, the company will provide dedicated preassembly, installation, operations and maintenance services to its clients developing offshore wind projects off the British coast.

The company expects at least 75-100 new jobs to be created for its UK operations within the next three years.

Until now, All NRG’s crew and technicians working in the UK have traveled from the company’s three Danish bases, located in Skive, Grenaa, and Esbjerg. With work on the UK’s bigger Round 3 offshore wind farms set to take off, opening an office in Grimsby will ensure All NRG can serve its UK project clients even better, says the company’s Director, Ulf Rye Bertelsen.

All NRG decided that Grimsby is the ideal location for its first UK office following a visit to several potential sites across the UK, which was organised by Tommy Graff Hansen from UK Trade and Invest Denmark (UKTI) at the British Embassy in Copenhagen in collaboration with Emma Toulson from the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership.

The company’s key clients are already there and it is perfectly located for rapid access to current and planned offshore projects, including the Westermost Rough, Gwynt y Mor and Humber Gateway offshore wind farms, where All NRG already has technicians working, says Ricco Veile, Managing Director of VB Enterprise.

“Grimsby is near the key offshore projects so for personnel transfer the sail time to the sites is shorter. That was our main focus for this first move to the UK, the sail time to the sites,” he says.

“Also, when we look out from our office all of our customers are right there. Siemens, Vestas, Dong, Eon, Centrica, all of them. We have opened the office to be near to them and to be ready for when things move fast on the Round 3 projects.”

All NRG is also likely to open further offices in the UK later, Veile adds. “UKTI were helpful in explaining the current UK market and arranging our visit to various harbours. In two to three years time, Hull is likely to be the new big pre-assembly site in the UK, as with Esbjerg in Denmark. Siemens is building a blade factory there for example and we will look at whether we should move to Hull also,” he says.

“We need to be local to have the right response times and that is why we hope to have more service and retrofit tasks handled from the UK.”

The British Ambassador to Denmark, Vivien Life, has welcomed the new investment from All NRG in Grimsby and sees the investment as a sign of more to come in the future for areas like the Humberside around the UK.

All NRG’s Grimsby office will be led by British national Kathryn Anne Kennedy Nørremark, in her new role as Operations Manager UK, while her Danish husband, Frank Nørremark, has been appointed Technical Manager UK. Both are experienced, well-known and respected offshore wind energy professionals, having worked for All NRG in Denmark and turbine manufacturer Vestas before that.

Image: All NRG