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North East firm aids natural disaster recovery in Japan

A North East engineering company is helping Japan to reinvigorate one of its regions after a natural disaster in 2011. Northumberland-based Osbit Power signed a deal to supply a key piece of safety equipment to a project to build the country’s first offshore wind farm. The firm’s innovative MaXccess-T18 crew transfer system is set to help engineers work on the Fukushima Forward project, which will see wind turbines installed 20km off the coast of Japan. It is hoped the project will help Fukushima become the centre of Japan’s emerging alternative power industry to help the region recover from the economic damage in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The project, also designed to give Japan alternative options for energy following the nuclear power station disaster in 2011, has been implemented by a large consortium led by Marubeni Corp. The revolutionary access system, invented by Osbit Power, will allow engineers to access the 2MW downwind floating turbine supplied by Hitachi and the 66kV floating sub-station, which are situated in deep and rough waters, 20km off the coast of Japan. With difficult wave conditions, the equipment has been chosen as it can be operated safely and efficiently in extremely difficult wave conditions. The MaXccess-T18 system has been installed on the project’s crew transfer vessel J-Cat One, which was built by Veka Shipbuilding in The Netherlands and is the first dedicated offshore wind crew boat in Japan. Osbit MD Tony Trapp said: “We are looking forward to helping ensure engineers can access and construct these new wind farms at the same levels of safety and regularity as engineers working on UK wind farms have been experiencing since we began supplying the system in 2012. “Financial assistance from DECC has been a great help in establishing OP as a leading supplier of access systems. “MaXccess systems are a proven, simple solution for safe high sea state access and have been in commercial use with leading firms, including Siemens, Statoil and Dong on major projects since 2012.” Joanne Leng, Deputy Chairman of the North East of England’s offshore renewables group, Energi Coast, added: “It is great to see one of our members becoming a supplier to such a ground-breaking and historic project. “Technology designed and distributed in North East of England, being used on a major project such as this, halfway around the globe, really underlines that the region is a cutting-edge, world leader when it comes to this type of engineering.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Martin Walker .