BP Bodelwyddan Village Hall consultation

I worked with BP to photograph a consultation event at Bodelwyddan Village Hall that helped explain to residents of the area the changes that would be brought about by the development of two new wind farms off the North Wales coast. The Mona and Morgan windfarms will be two of the largest offshore windfarms in the Irish Sea.

The wind farms will be located approximately 20km - 30km from the coast and be operational by 2029. Together, they will form one of the largest wind farms in the world, with a combined potential generating capacity of 3 gigawatts (GW). This is enough to power the equivalent of approximately 3.4 million UK households with clean electricity.

The development of the Mona and Morgan windfarms represents a significant achievement in the UK's transition towards renewable energy, and highlights the potential of offshore wind to play a key role in meeting the country's energy needs in a sustainable way.

On board the Fugro Synergy for BP

By far the best thing about working as a professional photographer is the variety of the work. The camera can gain you access to environments that are wildly different each shoot day and if you’re lucky, can sometimes take you to some incredible and unexpected places. One of the most interesting of my shoots in 2022 was an assignment from bp to photograph the crew and workings of the Fugro Synergy while on a recent stop at Liverpool docks.

The Synergy Modular Drilling Unit is a unique geotechnical vessel capable of delivering

high quality geotechnical data. Its design, standards and capacity make it an efficient

platform for geotechnical investigations and scientific drilling in challenging and remote offshore marine environments.

The shoot focussed on the Synergy’s role in sea bed core sampling, determining the sea bed composition to ensure that the sea bed substrate was capable of providing solid foundations for the siting of an array of wind turbines.  Sea bed composition is critical, mud, sand or silt that is too soft and uncompacted will not provide a firm enough foundation, while solid rock is impossible to drill to the depths required for the footings.

EnBW with EnBW and bp are leading the development of the Morgan and Mona – two offshore wind farms in the Irish Sea. Roughly located 30km from shore between the north coast of Wales and the Isle of Man the total area of the two farms will be 800 square kilometres – about half the size of Greater London and when complete the farm will generate 3GW of energy – enough to power an astonishing 3.4 million UK homes.

These projects are helping to achieve the UK's ambition of generating 50GW of power from offshore wind by 2030.

Fugro Synergy’s Party Chief, Jim Bridge