Pembroke Dock completes £60m quay to build floating wind turbines for the Celtic Sea

A 250-metre quay strong enough to bear turbine blades the length of a football pitch was formally opened at Pembroke Dock on Friday, the largest piece of port infrastructure built in Wales for 30 years and the first designed specifically for the floating wind farms planned for the Celtic Sea.

The £60m berth, funded by the port of Milford Haven, the Welsh government and the UK government’s floating offshore wind manufacturing fund, can take loads of 30 tonnes a square metre, allowing the steel and concrete floats on which turbines will stand to be assembled on the quayside and towed out through the haven. The first of three Celtic Sea projects, 50 miles south of the Pembrokeshire coast, is due to begin installation in 2029.

The port says the quay and the 20-hectare laydown area behind it will support about 400 jobs during assembly, roughly the number lost when the town’s power station closed in 2016, and 150 permanent jobs in operations and maintenance. Pembrokeshire has the second-lowest average wage of any Welsh county.

“This quay is a bet on the Celtic Sea, and it is a bet we had to place before the projects were certain, or the work would have gone to Brest or Cork,” said Andrew Ferrier, the port’s chief executive. “Nobody tows a 3,000-tonne float 300 miles if they can assemble it 50 miles away. We now have the only berth on this coast that can do it.”

The three Celtic Sea projects together are expected to generate 4.5 gigawatts, enough for about four million homes, with turbines of up to 20 megawatts each on floating platforms moored in water 100 metres deep. The developers have not yet announced where the floats will be fabricated, and Pembroke Dock faces competition from Port Talbot and from Falmouth in Cornwall. The port expects the first contract decisions in 2027.

Pembrokeshire college has opened a wind technician course at its Haverfordwest campus with 46 students, and the port has signed a pledge to recruit at least half its construction workforce from within 30 miles. Among the first intake is Bethan Rees, 19, from Neyland, whose father worked at the power station. “My dad left school and walked into a job at the refinery, and that world has gone,” she said. “This feels like the first thing that has come here instead of leaving.”

Environmental groups have accepted the quay but want conditions on the wider development. Milford Haven is a marine special area of conservation and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority said it would scrutinise any plan to light the laydown area at night.

The quay’s first customer will not be a turbine. A cruise ship carrying 1,200 passengers is booked to berth there in May.