Wind Turbine Installation and Service Insurance

Everything an insurer asks about wind work comes back to one question: what happens when somebody is hurt at the top.

A technician in a nacelle or on a hub is eighty to a hundred metres up, inside or on a machine, reached by a ladder or a small service lift. An unconscious or injured person cannot climb down, cannot be carried down a ladder, and a fire service ladder does not reach. On an upland or remote site an ambulance is a long way off. So the capability has to be on site and in the team: trained rescuers, rescue equipment appropriate to the tower and the nacelle, a practised procedure for lowering a casualty, and never a single technician working alone at height.

That is why this trade is underwritten on competence and procedure rather than on turnover. Expect questions about the recognised training your technicians hold, rescue equipment carried and inspected, team sizes, communications on remote sites, and whether a rescue has ever been exercised rather than written. A business that can describe a drill it has actually run is presenting the control that matters. One that relies on calling the emergency services has not understood the geometry.

A stationary turbine is not an inert one, and the fatal incidents in this work come from energy nobody accounted for.

A rotor that is stopped but not locked can turn. Hydraulic accumulators hold pressure after shutdown. A yaw drive can move. Electrical systems are at voltages that require proven isolation rather than a switch position. Capacitors hold charge. And all of this is inside a confined space with limited egress, where somebody is working with tools in close proximity to moving parts and live terminals. Add a fire in a nacelle, which is the scenario with no good outcome.

So the controls are isolation discipline and they are absolute. Rotor lock engaged and verified rather than assumed, hydraulic systems depressurised, electrical isolation proven at the point of work with a permit, a lock off system with individual locks rather than a shared one, and a rule that nobody works on a system another person isolated without verifying it themselves. Fire precautions in the nacelle, including what may be taken up and what hot work is permitted, belong in the same conversation because the escape options are limited to the ladder you came up.

The property side of this trade is concentrated in a handful of components, each of which is worth more than most contractors' annual turnover.

A blade is a single moulded item tens of metres long, with a long manufacturing lead time, transported on a specialist trailer and lifted into place by a large crane. Damage it in transit, in a lift, by dropping something onto it, or through a repair that failed, and the loss is the blade plus the lift to replace it plus the generation lost while the turbine stands idle. Gearboxes, generators and transformers behave the same way. None of it is a component you collect from a factor.

So two things need checking. Whether damage to the turbine and its components, which is the thing you are working on, is covered rather than excluded as the property worked upon, and at what limit, because the figure needs to reflect a blade rather than a tool. And whether loss of generation is contemplated, because a turbine stopped by something you did or failed to find is a revenue claim that continues until it runs again. On lifting, the contract lift question applies exactly as it does in crane work, and the answer should be settled before the crane arrives.

Wind work is bounded by the thing the machines are built to catch, and that creates a familiar pressure.

Component lifts have wind speed limits, and so does working at height on a tower. A weather window for a blade lift may be a few hours in a week, with a crane on hire by the day, a vessel or a transport booked, and a client waiting. Technicians climbing in marginal conditions, or a lift attempted at the edge of its limit, is how incidents happen in this sector. The same applies to lightning, which both damages blades and is a reason to stop work.

So the stop authority has to be real and supported commercially. Measured wind at hub height rather than a forecast, defined limits for each operation with specified actions, a named person who can stand a lift down without having to justify it afterwards, and agreement with the client in advance that the call will be respected. On ground conditions, crane pads and access tracks on upland sites need designing for the plant and the weather rather than for a dry week, which is the same lesson as every other lifting operation on this site.

Rescue and component values decide this one. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.