From time to time in recent years I’ve read news items about power generation in the UK where experts wonder if we’ve got sufficient electricity generating capacity now and into the future.
That power generation might be in short supply in the UK is no surprise to me: in recent years I’ve lost count of the number of voice overs I’ve recorded for Health and Safety videos for contractors that are decommissioning and dismantling gas and coal power stations. With the loss of fossile fuel generation it would seem that renewables may offer part of the solution.

Many of these videos I have been doing the VO for have been produced by Reel Take Films. This week they sent me a new script. I gave it a quick look and thought “at last!” after all those decommissioning videos here’s something geared to the future – a video about a wind farm.

And so it is – a video about a wind farm that when it was built had the largest generation capacity in the world, Its the Blyth Offshore Wind Farm – but the thing is it was constructed 2 decades ago and now the wind turbines are rather old so guess what? That’s right – its time to decommission it!

So although it s a video about the possible source of power generation of the future it’s also yet another video about decommissioning a power station!
The only difference for me that made a nice change was that this was a corporate video narration whereas the others have been H+S learning programmes.

One item in the script I was intrigued about was the reference to a “jack up barge”. I wondered what it was but a Google search  provided the answer with a photo from the decommissioning at Blyth.

The video is for internal use and so is not on-line at the moment – but as a voice over it was interesting to discover exactly how you go about dismantling a wind turbine.

The video is being produced by Steve Hart at Reeltake Films

Chris Radley – Voice Over