Investigations are being carried out into a wind turbine in one of the UK’s first commercial offshore wind farms that caught fire off the Norfolk coast last week.
No one was injured and all workers were evacuated immediately, energy firm RWE, which owns the site, said. The fire broke out in the nacelle and eventually put itself out.
The Scroby Sands wind farm, which has been operating since March 2004, has an installed capacity of 60MW, enough for 48,000 households, RWE says.
The Coastguard said it was monitoring the situation closely.
It’s an interesting one because having been built on a sand bank that has now risen, four turbines out of the 30 Vestas turbines are now isolated from the rest of the farm and can only be approached for maintenance using special amphibious crew transfer vessel CRC Walrus.
Wind turbine fires are rare, although a lack of industry data could obscure the true picture.
A Vestas V90 turbine was reported as catching fire in southwestern Germany in December, the cause of which has not been identified.
