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Seven iconic towers stand bladeless off the Irish coast \u2014 a rare glimpse into what offshore wind’s messy endgame actually looks like, and the industry isn’t eager for you to pay attention.<\/p>\n
The equipment used to strip those 18 blades from six miles out in open water does something that sounds physically impossible, and it changes everything about how these giant structures can be taken apart.<\/p>\n
This isn’t just one old farm’s problem \u2014 it’s a preview of what hundreds of aging offshore turbines worldwide will demand, and someone is going to have to pay for it.<\/p>\n
The company’s own financial filings contain a number that quietly reveals just how expensive “end of cycle” gets, and it lands harder than anyone expected.<\/p>\n
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Offshore wind is old enough now that the first farms are starting to wear out, and hardly anyone\u2019s taken one apart yet. Denmark took down the 11 little turbines at Vindeby, the world\u2019s first offshore wind farm, in 2017, and England cleared the two at Blyth in 2019. That\u2019s pretty much the whole list of finished jobs. So the one sitting off the east coast of Ireland is interesting for a reason the industry would probably rather it wasn\u2019t: it\u2019s a 22-year-old wind farm that quit working, got half-dismantled, and is now waiting on paperwork to come down the rest of the way.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve sailed past Arklow Bank in the last year, you\u2019ve seen it. Seven steel towers, 406 feet to where the blade tips used to be, standing on a sandbank about six miles off County Wicklow with nothing turning on top of them. The blades came off in the summer of 2025. The towers, the nacelles (the boxes on top that hold the gearbox and generator), the monopiles under the water and roughly 14 miles of cable are all still out there.<\/p>\n
And according to the company that owns it, they\u2019re getting more dangerous every year they stay.<\/p>\n
Ireland\u2019s only offshore wind farm has been off since May 2024<\/p>\n
Arklow Bank Wind Park Phase 1 was a big deal when it went in. GE built it in 2003 and 2004 with Airtricity, an Irish developer, as a demonstration site for its then-new 3.6-megawatt offshore turbine, and GE\u2019s own announcement<\/a> called it the first offshore wind project anywhere with turbines rated above 3 megawatts. Seven machines, 25.2 megawatts combined, each with a 341-foot rotor on a hub 241 feet above the sea. It started sending power to the Irish grid in 2005, and it\u2019s still the only offshore wind farm in Ireland that ever has.<\/p>\n Then it got old. One of the seven was hit by lightning on October 19, 2022, during a thunderstorm, and burned until there wasn\u2019t much left of its blades. The rest kept going until May 2024, when the last three turbines still running were switched off. The company\u2019s 2024 accounts, as reported by RT\u00c9<\/a>, put that down to those three turbines \u201cincurring major faults\u201d in the second quarter, and say they were deactivated for safety reasons after reaching the end of their cycle.<\/p>\n Which, frankly, is about as much detail as anyone outside the company\u2019s going to get. GE Vernova, the spun-off GE energy business that now owns the operating company, Arklow Energy Ltd, hasn\u2019t said publicly what the faults were. A 20-year-old gearbox 241 feet up in salt air can go wrong in a lot of ways, and I wouldn\u2019t want to guess which one.<\/p>\n The money side tells the same story in fewer words. Revenue fell 76 percent in 2024, from 3.66 million euros to 889,003 euros, and the company booked a loss of 14.2 million euros for the year, most of it a 13.7-million-euro provision for what it called a blade maintenance campaign. That campaign\u2019s what you can see from the shore now.<\/p>\n So how do you get blades off a dead turbine six miles out?<\/p>\n You don\u2019t send a ship, exactly. You send a barge that stops being a barge.<\/p>\n Autonoci\u00f3n Newsletter<\/p>\n No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Privacy policy (opens in new window)<\/a><\/p>\n The vessel GE Vernova used was a jack-up called Typhoon 3000, which is basically a flat steel pontoon about 197 feet long and 92 feet wide with four legs at the corners, each 171 feet long. Towed into position, it drops those legs to the seabed and then winches its own hull up out of the water until it\u2019s standing on them like a table. The waves keep moving. The deck doesn\u2019t. That\u2019s the only way you\u2019ll get a crane steady enough to unbolt a blade more than 160 feet long from a hub 241 feet up without the hook swinging around. We covered a much bigger version of the same trick when a Belgian installation ship climbed out of the North Sea<\/a> to put turbines up, and this is the same idea run backwards.<\/p>\n Arklow Bank is a sandbank, so the water around the towers is only 10 to 23 feet deep, which you\u2019d think makes life easier. It doesn\u2019t. That\u2019s too shallow for the big installation ships and exactly right for something like Typhoon 3000, which doesn\u2019t have its own engines and had to be towed out by an anchor-handling tug. The marine analytics firm Spinergie<\/a>, which tracked the vessels through the job, says the barge carried a rack built to hold nine blades, which is three turbines\u2019 worth. So the crew made two round trips out of the Port of Waterford, on Ireland\u2019s southeast coast, and came back each time with nine blades laid in the rack.<\/p>\n The campaign ran from June 7 to July 13, 2025. Thirty-six days for the barge, with a median of 3.4 days parked at each tower and a couple of stops that stretched to six. Eighteen blades off six turbines, because the seventh had already lost its blades to the fire. The weather cooperated, with waves averaging under 3 feet, and the blades went back to Waterford, where they\u2019re in storage.<\/p>\n Tip height<\/p>\n 406 ft<\/p>\n Hub at 241 feet, 341-foot rotor. Seven GE 3.6-megawatt machines, 25.2 MW combined.<\/p>\n Blades removed<\/p>\n 18<\/p>\n Two barge trips from Waterford, nine blades a trip, June 7 to July 13, 2025. The seventh turbine lost its blades to a lightning fire.<\/p>\n Water depth<\/p>\n 10 to 23 ft<\/p>\n A sandbank about six miles off Wicklow, too shallow for the big installation ships.<\/p>\n TARGET<\/p>\n Towers out<\/p>\n 2028<\/p>\n If planning consent lands in the first half of 2027. Permission requested through June 19, 2033.<\/p>\n Why only the blades?<\/p>\n Because blades are what\u2019s most likely to come down on their own. A fiberglass blade that\u2019s been pitching in Irish Sea wind for two decades with no one maintaining it is a liability in a way a steel tube isn\u2019t, at least not yet. Spinergie calls the 2025 job a \u201cmake safe\u201d campaign rather than a cleanup, and I think that\u2019s the right read: you pull the thing that could fall off and hit a fishing boat, and you leave the rest standing while the lawyers work.<\/p>\n And the lawyers have been at it for a while. Arklow Energy asked the Irish planning body, An Coimisi\u00fan Plean\u00e1la, to open pre-application talks in January 2025, sat through three meetings with it between June 2025 and March 2026, and got the consultation closed out in May. Then, in September, it filed the real thing: an application to dismantle and remove all seven turbines, the foundations, an onshore substation, 4.6 miles of inter-array cable and 9.7 miles of export cable, all of which has to be dug out of the seabed, cut and hauled away.<\/p>\n The cover letter is where it gets blunt. Jerry Barnes, a director at the planning consultancy MacCabe Durney Barnes, wrote on the company\u2019s behalf that the degrading structures pose \u201can increasing risk to the safety of the maritime area,\u201d per the Irish Times<\/a>, and warned of falling debris that could wash up on the coast. The paper also reports that a preliminary engineering review found the degradation will increase exponentially beyond 2027, which isn\u2019t the kind of phrase you put in a filing unless you want the regulator to move.<\/p>\n How much steel are we talking about? GE\u2019s own fact sheet from when the farm went up listed each complete turbine at 290 metric tons, roughly 320 short tons, with the tubular tower at about 160 metric tons (176 short tons) and each monopile at 280 metric tons (309 short tons), driven into the sand with a 16-foot footprint. Multiply by seven and you\u2019ve got somewhere north of 4,000 short tons of hardware sitting in 20 feet of water, minus the blades. Arklow Energy hasn\u2019t published a cost for getting it out, and I couldn\u2019t find one anywhere else, so we\u2019re guessing.<\/p>\n The timeline is tighter than it looks<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the catch. In its December 2025 directors\u2019 report, the company said it expected to start decommissioning in the summer of 2027. By the time the September filing went in, that\u2019d slipped: Barnes told the commission that if consent arrives in the first half of 2027, the offshore work could happen in 2028. So the towers get at least two more winters, and the company is openly asking the commission to hurry.<\/p>\n Will it? Arguably the commission has bigger fish on its desk. Five large offshore wind farms in the Irish Sea are in the planning system right now, including an 800-megawatt one that SSE wants to build on the very same sandbank, with turbines up to about 940 feet tall. The old seven are, in a sense, in the way of the new 47 to 56, and I\u2019d bet that\u2019s not lost on anyone in Dublin.<\/p>\n Which brings up a question I don\u2019t think anyone has answered publicly: will the monopiles actually come out? The meeting records from the pre-application talks say partial removal of the foundations was the likely approach, meaning the piles get cut off at some depth below the seabed rather than pulled whole. The records don\u2019t say how deep. On a sandbank that shifts, that\u2019s probably the sensible option. It also means Ireland\u2019s first offshore wind farm will leave seven steel stumps under the sand more or less forever.<\/p>\n