RWE’s Sofia Offshore Wind Farm has launched its leading renewable education programme ‘Champions for Wind’ in North East Lincolnshire.
The careers initiative developed by Sofia Offshore Wind Farm works with teachers across the region to highlight associated employment opportunities within the offshore wind industry. Throughout the two-year programme, teachers will be supported in developing tailored curriculum materials in their specialist subject, with a focus on offshore wind and its careers.
The cohort in North East Lincolnshire will build on recent success in Redcar and Cleveland, where the Sofia team has just delivered a three-year ‘Champions for Wind programme’. Combined with the other STEM activities delivered in this time, the Sofia education programme has now engaged with over 11,000 pupils across the Tees Valley area.
To celebrate its launch in Grimsby, Sofia has released a short film showcasing the success of Redcar and Cleveland’s Champions for Wind three-year programme, which can be viewed here.
A launch event was held at Healing Manor in Grimsby with local teachers, North East Lincolnshire Council staff, RWE representatives and CATCH UK employees attending. The event gave an overview of the programme and how the project can be delivered within various educational settings. The Grimsby cohort has onboarded ten teachers from eight institutions, and will work with them for two academic years.
Discussing the success of Champions for Wind, Mike Cargill, managing director of UK STEM, who delivers the programme on behalf of RWE, said: “Champions for Wind has been the backbone of our education programme. The immediate success and the future legacy lies in the way we are supporting teachers in developing their own curriculum resources. In Redcar and Cleveland, we’ve had around 15 teachers on-board across 13 institutions, this means that hundreds of children have accessed and continue to access the resources through their own work back at schools. Now we are sharing those resources online across other schools as well.
Zoe Keeton OBE, Head of Stakeholders and Local Markets UK & Ireland, at RWE Renewables said: “Champions for Wind is one of our flagship programmes. It has enabled us to work with teacher champions to design activities that really work with the curriculum while showing the great opportunities available in the offshore wind industry. As we build and develop our wind farm, we really want to engage with the communities in which we’re working and show them all the opportunities that brings.”
RWE has a strong connection with offshore wind in the Grimsby region, including operational offshore wind farms Humber Gateway and Triton Knoll and their operational hubs nearby. With operations and maintenance activities for Sofia and Triton Knoll Offshore Wind Farm managed from RWE’s new offshore wind operations base, the ‘Grimsby Hub,’ RWE is also developing in the region its two Dogger Bank South projects which, together, would have a potential installed capacity of around 3 GW.
Sofia Offshore Wind Farm currently under construction is located on Dogger Bank, 195 kilometres from the nearest point on the UK’s north east coast, and will have a single offshore converter platform, with the electricity generated transported to landfall 220 kilometres away in Redcar, Teesside.