The team behind Dogger Bank Offshore Wind Farm's 'Safety by Design' initiative has won a major award for health, safety and wellbeing at the first ever Global Offshore Wind Awards.

Organised by RenewableUK with Dogger Bank Wind Farm partner SSE Renewables as headline sponsors, the awards highlight the achievements of innovative people working in the offshore wind industry, as the UK continues its journey to improve Britain's energy security through an ambition of installing 50 GW of offshore wind by 2030.

Winning the first award of the evening for Offshore Wind Health & Safety and Wellbeing, the team from Dogger Bank Offshore Wind Farm, including SSE Renewables, Equinor and Wood Thilsted, were commended by the judges for the way they included health and safety as an integral part of project planning and how their approach was the embodiment of best practice in the industry.

The 'Safety by Design' initiative used operational experiences, past incidents and industry statistics to improve health and safety through design on Dogger Bank.

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Through several design changes of the wind turbines, foundations and service operation vessels (SOVs), this resulted in the following improvements over the project lifetime: 1 million offshore lifts removed, manual handling of 20,000 tons over 1000 kilometres and removal of exposure to a 3-meter fall for 650 days. In addition, the risk of collision between SOVs and the wind turbines has been significantly reduced.

Accepting the award on behalf of Dogger Bank Wind Farm, Project Director Olly Cass said: "Health and Safety are always the top priorities at Dogger Bank – our motto is 'if it is not safe, we don't do it.' It is fantastic for our H&S colleagues and the wider team to have the quality of their work recognised in this way by the judges and in front of industry peers."

The award submission was compiled by project partners Equinor. Andrew Saunders, Dogger Bank Prepare for Operations Manager at Equinor, who led the initiative, said: ”It is a real honour to be recognised by the industry for this 'Safe by Design' initiative, the result of strong collaboration between project partners and contractors to make a real difference. Taking G+ incident statistics, operational experiences and lessons has led us to eliminate vast amounts of craning and manual handling activities, which will have an incredibly positive impact to the health, safety and wellbeing of our technicians and engineers on a daily basis.”

Dan McgGrail RenewableUk's Chief Executive, said: "The UK is a world leader in offshore wind and it's right to celebrate what drives our industry forward - growth, innovation, the vibrancy and resilience of our supply chain, our incredible people and the quality of our provisions on health and safety."