Emergency concept for offshore wind farms
The German Maritime Search and Rescue Service (DGzRS) is working with wind farm operators to set up an emergency center to handle accidents at offshore wind farms.
The meeting of wind farm operators and experts from the German Maritime Search and Rescue Service had long been planned, but a recent event made the meeting all the more timely. As Renewables International reported, an installer recently fell to his death in a tragic accident at Bard Offshore 1.
German Marine Search believes that at least 1,000 people will simultaneously be involved in construction, repairs, and servicing at various offshore wind farms in the North Sea and the Baltic within around 10 years. As a result, the number of accidents is likely to increase over the next few years. To coordinate rescue attempts, an emergency center is to be set up near German Marine Search's own headquarters in Bremen.
Captain Udo Helge Fox, director of the rescue service and management board member at DGzRS, says that focuses on coordination for accident management. He adds that constant monitoring of the sky and sea could be added as additional task in the mid to long-term. "Right now, a task force is to implement the first steps as quickly as possible," Fox says. Consisting of representatives of the German Marine Search and wind farm operators, the task force will first clarify legal and financial issues along with the emergency center's mandate so that the center can go into provisional operation this year.
In a way, it is already in business, as the recent accident reveals. The center in Bremen used installation ship Wind Lift 1, which was already at Bard Offshore 1, to direct the mission, alerted two of the organization's cruisers, and coordinated two helicopters from the German Federal Police and the German Marines. As DGzRS spokesperson Christian Stipeldey put it, "it turns out that such emergencies can still be handled quite well," but he added that it is also already clear that "we will not be able to cover future tasks with our current capacities at some point."
If the currently proposed concept is adopted without changes, annual operating costs could add up to 10 million euros and would have to be covered by wind farm operators. Stipeldey says the feedback is already been positive because, after all, this solution is relatively inexpensive compared to an emergency center for each wind farm. (Anne-Katrin Wehrmann / Craig Morris)
