First turbine at East Anglia Three — the longest blades in UK waters

What happened

On 21 April 2026, the first of 95 wind turbines was installed at East Anglia Three, the 1.4 GW offshore wind farm being built by ScottishPower Renewables and Masdar some 69 kilometres off the Suffolk coast. The turbine is a Siemens Gamesa machine in the 14 MW-plus class, and it carries 115-metre blades — the longest yet installed in UK waters. Darren Davidson, UK head of Siemens Energy and Siemens Gamesa, called them "the biggest blades ever built for a project in UK waters".

Installation was carried out by Cadeler's O-class jack-up vessel Wind Osprey. A second Cadeler vessel, the P-class Wind Pace, was due to join later in April 2026 on its first European deployment, allowing turbines to be installed in parallel. Cadeler chief executive Mikkel Gleerup said running two vessels lets the project "maintain a consistent and efficient installation pace".

Offshore construction on the roughly £4 billion (about €4.6 billion) project began in April 2025. Turbine installation is expected to be complete in the third or fourth quarter of 2026, and the wind farm is expected to generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 1.3 million British homes.

The technology

The 115-metre blade is the headline number, and it is worth dwelling on what it represents. Blade length drives swept area, and swept area drives energy capture: each increment in blade length raises the yield of every turbine position in the array, which is why the industry keeps pushing the dimension despite the manufacturing, transport and installation problems it creates. A 14 MW-class machine with 115-metre blades sweeps an area that would have been implausible a decade ago, when UK projects were being built with turbines a third the size.

The manufacturing story is domestic. All 285 blades for the project, three per turbine across 95 machines, are being made at Siemens Gamesa's factory in Hull. That makes East Anglia Three not just the largest-bladed project in UK waters but one supplied from a UK production line at serial volume.

Installing components this large is its own discipline. Cadeler's Wind Osprey has been upgraded for the current generation of turbines, and the arrival of Wind Pace gives the project two capable jack-ups working simultaneously — a scheduling hedge against weather windows in the southern North Sea as the project pushes through the 2026 season.

Why it matters for UK & Ireland

East Anglia Three is, at 1.4 GW, among the largest generation projects under construction in Britain, and its progress matters for the government's clean power targets in a period when several offshore projects elsewhere have stalled on costs. A first turbine standing 69 kilometres offshore, on schedule a year after offshore construction began, is evidence the delivery machine still works.

The Hull dimension matters as much as the megawatts. The 285-blade order demonstrates that a UK factory can supply the largest components in the market, not just legacy sizes — a point of substance for industrial-strategy arguments about capturing offshore wind supply chains rather than importing them. For Irish offshore ambitions in the Irish and Celtic Seas, the project is also a live demonstration of the vessel logistics, port capacity and blade dimensions that any comparable development will need to plan around.

What to watch

The pace of the installation campaign through 2026 is the immediate measure: 94 turbines remain, and the project's own guidance points to completion of turbine installation in Q3–Q4 2026, with two vessels working in parallel from late April. Watch the interval between installations as Wind Pace enters service, first power and the ramp to full 1.4 GW output, and whether the 115-metre blade becomes the default for the next round of UK and Irish projects now that Hull has produced them at volume.