HORNSEA 3: Safer, Leaner, Greener in UK North Sea

Leaving a lasting legacy is the task for Orsted’s Luke Bridgman, Managing Director for the colossal Hornsea 3 project.

“This is one of the bigger infrastructure projects in the UK right now, delivering nearly 3GW of power, for more than three million homes, making a material difference to the energy transition, and that is what gets us out of bed in the morning,” he says of the £8.5 billion core infrastructure project which received its development consent in December 2020.

When complete, Hornsea 3 will be the world’s single largest offshore windfarm with around 200 turbines covering almost 700 km² (the entire country of Singapore is 728 km²).

“We don’t think the title will be knocked off for some time,” smiles Bridgman. “I enjoy having the Guinness World Record certificate for Hornsea 2 next to my office and I look forward to having the same for Hornsea 3 soon.”

ONSHORE SUCCESS

Currently, the project is going through a phase of complex onshore works that will bring power to the grid when energy is eventually produced out in the North Sea. The offshore site is 120km off the Norfolk coast. It’s a cold and remote location, with the Netherlands to the east, Yorkshire to the west, and Norway a long way north. Subsea cables will travel south, reaching the shore at Weybourne in north Norfolk before an onshore cable corridor transfers green power to a substation south of Norwich city centre.

Orsted has vast experience building substantial projects of this nature and understands the upheaval that comes with effective rollout. This is why it works with the world’s best and the region’s best, whilst taking care to work closely with the local community.

Currently, Bridgman is happy with progress. From heavy infrastructure work at yards around the world, to cable manufacture in Europe, to digging in Norfolk, the team is advancing quickly.

“We are going very well,” he beams. “We started work on the high-voltage direct current (HVDC) system in 2022 and we are a long way ahead. Onshore is the main crux of work at the moment and our onshore converter station in Norwich is what we are busy with – erecting steelwork and foundations right now. That is where we will convert power from DC back to AC. We are largely out of the ground with the foundations and building structures above ground, and that is a big step in the right direction.”

On the cable route, carefully trenching and tunnelling through more than 50km of rural agricultural land is a mammoth job. The preliminary work to gain permissions and approvals is itself a big task, then sourcing the correct contractors and materials is an international effort. The actual work happening on the ground is the next step in a multi-party, multi-skill, multi-geography effort.

“We are laying the ducts that cables are pulled into, and we have already started pulling the first cables. The length of cable is dictated by how much you can fit on a drum, how many drums you can fit on a truck, and how many specialist trucks you can get. Around every 1.5km you join the cable and we have transported a lot of the cables to site already. We’ve even had to make some special smaller drums to be able to fit under some low Victorian era bridges. The cables are manufactured in Sweden and shipped into the Port of Boston in Lincolnshire before moving into Norfolk with a police escort the whole way for safety.

“We are also working on the interface between shore and sea, the horizontal directional drill (HDD) near Weybourne,” Bridgman adds. “The jack-up can currently be seen, sitting around 600m offshore, and it is there to receive the drill when it comes out of the water. In early 2026, we arrive with the vessel and pull the cables to connect onshore and offshore and that is exciting as it is one of the first major pieces of offshore work.”

INTERNATIONAL EFFORT

Headquartered in Denmark, Orsted’s work engages an international supply chain and encourages global collaboration with UK suppliers playing an important part in delivery. Currently, manufacturing of various elements is underway around the world and soon materials and equipment will head, through a tried and tested supply chain – to the UK North Sea.

“We are heavily into the manufacturing phase, right across the project,” explains Bridgman. “We are soon to begin manufacturing monopiles at the fabrication yard in Teesside where we will be the first customer to have monopiles from that factory. We also have a factory in Bilbao, and manufacturing will start there next year as well.

“At the same time, we are starting to make array cables in Italy and Greece,” he adds. “In Thailand, we are busy with two huge HVDC topsides. One is very mature and the other is coming out of the ground and not a long way behind.”

The first topside will sail from Thailand to Norway to be fitted out before heading to site in late Q1/early Q2 2026. From here, a major campaign will get underway offshore with Bridgman expecting a “very busy year” as export cables and monopiles are installed. Towards the end of 2026, turbines will start to arrive and be erected over a 12-month period, before commissioning and completion at the end of 2027.

During that time, a major Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) will also be installed alongside the onshore converter station. As demand for power rises and falls throughout the day, the immense energy produced not just by Hornsea 3, but by other renewables in the vicinity, will be stored and deployed appropriately through the use of a price-volatility busting BESS, delivered by Tesla Megapack.

“It will be a 600 MW/h battery – one of the biggest in Europe when delivered – co-located with the offshore windfarm, and that is exciting,” admits Bridgman of another element of the project that demonstrates its scale. “We are the first offshore windfarm to deliver a large-scale battery energy storage system co-located in this way and it will help balance energy infrastructure as we move through the green transition. It will help us, and help the government’s green energy ambition, while supporting safe and efficient operation of the grid. We are proud to deliver this battery system – it has to make financial sense for Orsted but as part of the energy transition we aim to support National Grid and Ofgem ensuring we have a very strong and secure energy system while we are in this transition period.”

POSITIVE IMPACT

Since the first offshore windfarm, Vindeby, was installed by Orsted in 1991, the company has been resolute in its approach. Always pushing boundaries and leaving a positive impact, but doing so in a respectful manner – both in terms of environment and community.

Across the onshore cable route, all farmlands will be completely remediated and, in many cases, improved.

“We are passionate about leaving a positive impact on the local community where we work,” says Bridgman, adding that the company works with the main contractors to employ a local supply chain where possible. Firms across Norfolk have been onboarded across civil works, surfacing, trenching, accommodation, and general labour. A Community Benefit Fund has also been established to support ongoing prosperity in the area – with the first grants being awarded in summer this year.

“We look to work on STEM schemes to ensure we build skills for the future and leave a positive legacy. We will spend £7 million over the next 10 years in North Norfolk, along our cable route, and in parts of Suffolk – which we deploy through collaboration with parish councillors and business leaders with a focus on education,” says Bridgman. For fairness, Orsted and the Hornsea 3 team have employed a third party, Grantscape, to examine applications for funding and determine who is successful.

Orsted will also sponsor and support graduates in the green energy space from the local university – the University of East Anglia (UEA).

“We aim to leave the area and the communities in a better condition than when we arrived, and we want to be a strong partner with the groups we work with. This is at the heart of what we do and I believe it is important for companies such as Orsted to lead on this. We are genuine, we are deliberate, it is not about box ticking, and we see it in places that we have worked in – places like Barrow and throughout the Humber region – where there is an enduring positive legacy,” Bridgman explains.

WORLD’S BEST

Bridgman, an electrical engineer, has been with Orsted for a decade, overseeing the electrical transmission system for the company’s major Race Bank windfarm, itself once one of the world’s largest. He worked on Hornsea 2 as the Deputy EPC Director before taking up the Managing Director position for Hornsea 3.

“I was lucky enough to join Orsted just as it began dominating the industry,” he says. “Since then, I have learnt a lot from really great people and I have always been on some of the world’s biggest, if not the biggest projects each time.”

Within Orsted, around 400 people work on the Hornsea 3 project, but the wider network, across the supply chain, brings the employed number of people well into the thousands. Bridgman expects in excess of 5000 people to be employed during construction and 1200 through the windfarm’s operational life. Right now, there is a lot of onshore engineering, but in 2026, he says, “activity will ramp up significantly offshore”.

It is not just in the UK that Orsted is ramping up development and delivery. In 2024, and over the next year, the company will build and generate more energy capacity than ever before. As of April this year, Greater Changhua 1 and 2a, Orsted’s first gigawatt-scale offshore wind farms outside Europe, were fully connected to the grid, producing enough renewable energy to power one million Taiwanese households a year. Borkum Riffgrund 3 is also currently under construction in the German North Sea, and will become Germany’s largest and first zero-subsidy offshore windfarm. And recently, the Helena Energy Center in Texas was completed – a combined solar and wind project with 518 MW capacity. Orsted is also busy with the major Revolution and Sunrise Wind projects in the US Northeast and a number of other onshore projects across Germany, Ireland and the US.

“Orsted has the biggest pipeline of projects and the biggest track record of delivery in offshore wind. That means we have built very strong partnerships with the leading supply chain companies out there over many years. We use these relationships and our experience to derisk our execution as much as possible. With the constantly shifting external environment, this derisking is critical to our success as a company and on Hornsea 3. Certainty on our delivery, with safety as the absolute priority is what we in the project need to always focus on,” says Bridgman.

In September, Orsted received UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) contract for difference (CfD) for Hornsea 4 as well as a portion of Hornsea 3 which was re-bid, along with other Round 4 projects. When complete, Hornsea 3 and, eventually, Hornsea 4 pending a final investment decision, will join Hornsea 1 and 2, creating the world’s largest offshore wind zone, unlocking cluster synergies and covering the power consumption of around five million UK homes.

Orsted’s ambition is to have built 35-38 GW of renewable capacity across all green energy technologies by 2030, including 20-22 GW in offshore wind capacity. Hornsea 3 will contribute, and Bridgman is enthusiastic.

“Our mission at Hornsea 3 is ‘to build the world’s single largest offshore wind farm, safer, leaner and greener than ever before’. It’s a special project for me,” he says, highlighting the diverse team of industry leading experts across technical, engineering, finance, commercial, operations; “it’s a very good place to be. You don’t deliver projects like this without having the world’s best people around you”.

As onshore work continues, and the larger offshore undertaking ramps up into the New Year, Orsted is again proving its ability on the global stage. Hornsea 3 is making its mark now and into the future.