Town firm wins a contract on a world record wind farm - and it's worth millions

JDR Cables, based at the town’s docks, has won the deal for 62-miles of cables for Ørsted’s record-breaking Hornsea Project Two offshore wind farm.

When it’s complete and operational in 2022, the wind farm will supply clean electricity to over 1.3 million homes.

And the cables being handled by JDR are enough to stretch from Hartlepool to Leeds. They will all be assembled in JDR’s Hartlepool facility.

It’s nine years since JDR opened a new £20m state-of-the-art Hartlepool factory, as exclusively revealed by the Hartlepool Mail, and with bosses saying they hoped to bring 200 jobs to town.

Since, then the firm has grown and the Hartlepool plant has won a string of high-profile orders.

JDR is owned by the TFKable Group,

The latest was welcomed by JDR chief executive officer Richard Turner as an “incredible achievement.”

He said: “Hornsea Project Two is a 1.4 gigawatt (GW) offshore wind project that will be built at the lowest ever price seen in the UK. This incredible achievement is being enabled by organisations like JDR and Ørsted working collaboratively to push the technical boundaries of offshore wind projects – making them more economic than ever before and leading the way for future developments.”

Inter-array cables, such as the ones being supplied by JDR, are the ones which link turbines together, and carry the clean electricity generated by the turbines to an offshore substation, which converts it to a higher voltage for transmission to shore.

The project is Ørsted’s first in the UK to use 66kV for its array cables, having used 33kV for previous projects. Using cables with a higher voltage helps to reduce electrical losses during transmission.

Patrick Harnett, Engineering, Procurement and Construction Director for Hornsea Project Two said: “This contract builds on experience from previous projects including Race Bank offshore wind farm, which we opened earlier this year, and Hornsea Project One, currently in construction.

“As our wind farm projects have grown in size, and distance from shore, so too have the contracts we place within the supply chain. The technology we use is also changing as we innovate to build these projects at massively lower cost of electricity into the UK’s grid. We are proud to sign this contract with a UK-based firm, and look forward to continuing our collaboration with JDR Cables.”

TFKable Group employs approximately 4,000 people and consists of several trading companies, with a significant number of production plants around Europe and a Cable Waste Recycling Department in Poland. TFKable Group offers 25,000 types of wires and cables, which are sold in 80 countries. With a consistent growth strategy based on client portfolio diversification, TFKable Group has cemented its position as a world leader in the cable business, with significant further development potential.