Crewing SOVs and CTVs: Where Wind Operators Will Find Their Next Crews

Offshore wind has spent the last decade solving engineering problems: bigger turbines, deeper water, longer export cables. From where I sit, at the head of a crewing company that has supplied seafarers to shipowners since 2007, the next bottleneck is more human. Every new wind farm needs a fleet of vessels to build and maintain it, and every one of those vessels needs a qualified marine crew. Service operation vessels need DP officers and engineers able to run complex hybrid power plants. Crew transfer vessels need skippers and deckhands who can put technicians onto a turbine safely, day after day, in a North Sea swell.

The industry is adding vessels faster than it trains the people to sail them. Owners and charterers who start planning crews only when the newbuilding leaves the yard often find that the officers they need are already committed elsewhere. In this article I look at the crewing profiles wind vessels require, the three pools wind operators can draw from, and how to turn those pools into reliable crews.

Wind farm support falls broadly into two vessel categories with very different crewing needs.

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