Galloper Internship - Week 3

This week I went down to the Galloper turbine assembly base in Great Yarmouth with Rachel, where I met Peter who I site manager at the assembly base. He gave us a guided tour of the whole base explaining everything as we went. I learnt that the turbine blades are actually made of very thick fibre glass and weigh 26 tonnes each, they are made in sets of three and have to be within a certain weight percentage of each other or else the turbine won't balance. The turbine blades have large red dots on the so that birds flying by can see them and won't bump into the turbine. Each Blade is 75m long and they had 13 sets (39 blades) at the base when I visited.


The tower of the turbine is made of 3 parts that each weigh up to 200 tonnes. The top section has what looks like rope spirally wrapped around it, this reduces the pressure of the wind in one area of the tower and creates a vortex around the tower. It takes roughly half an hour to climb up the tower as it is 90m high!  The head of the tower is called the nacelle and that weighs another 200 tonnes, this is the part of the turbine that the blades attach to. So altogether the turbine weighs almost 900 tonnes!

After we had some photos taken we went back to the office where I met some more of the team. Dave is installation manager and was explaining to me all about the foundations and how the monopiles need large slabs of granite, up to 10m in diameter, around them to protect the sea bed from erosion, therefore preventing the turbine from being unstable. It was a really great day and I’m so glad to have had the opportunity to spend some time there meeting the people I did.

- Evie



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