Why We’re Partnering with Njord Subsea: Building End-to-End Capability for the Next Generation of Offshore Wind
Today, we announced that we’ve signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Njord Subsea, bringing together two of the UK’s most technically focused independent consultancies in offshore energy.
This isn’t just another corporate handshake. This partnership addresses a real challenge facing the offshore energy sector today – and it’s one we’ve been thinking about carefully for some time.
The Challenge: Marine Energy Infrastructure is Getting More Complex
When Ternan Energy was founded in 2016, most UK offshore wind projects were in relatively shallow waters, close to shore, with well-understood seabed conditions. Fast forward to 2025, and the picture looks radically different.
Today’s offshore energy developments – from offshore wind to subsea interconnectors – are pushing into deeper waters, further from shore, and into increasingly challenging geological environments. These projects aren’t just bigger – they’re fundamentally more complex, requiring tighter integration between multiple engineering disciplines.
A developer or operator might work with one consultancy for geotechnical site characterisation and foundation design, another for offshore transmission system engineering, and yet another for cable route assessments. Each brings excellent technical capability within their domain, but the critical relationship between seabed conditions and cable system performance often gets lost between disciplines. Understanding how cables will interact with specific soil types, bathymetry and geohazards requires genuine integration – not just coordination meetings between separate consultancies. When these connections are fragmented, project risks emerge precisely at these technical interfaces.
Where Marine Geoscience Meets Offshore Transmission
This is where our partnership with Njord Subsea comes in.
Ternan Energy’s expertise lies in understanding what’s beneath the seabed – the geology, soil mechanics, geophysics, and how foundations will perform in complex marine environments. We help developers answer questions like: What foundation loads can this site support? What are the geohazards? How will anchoring systems perform? What’s the optimal foundation design given the ground conditions?
Njord Subsea’s expertise focuses on what connects these foundations to shore – the offshore transmission infrastructure, subsea cable systems, and the complex engineering that makes power export possible. They help developers solve challenges around: How do we install cables through this seabed? What are the burial requirements? How do we design offshore substations? How do we manage the interface between array and export systems?
These aren’t separate challenges – they’re intrinsically linked.
Cable burial assessment requires detailed understanding of seabed soil conditions. Foundation design must consider cable protection systems. Route optimisation depends on geohazard mapping. Geotechnical investigations must be designed to support both foundation requirements and cable routing decisions.
By bringing these capabilities together under a formal partnership, we can provide clients with genuinely integrated technical support that considers the full offshore infrastructure picture from day one – whether that’s an offshore wind development, a subsea interconnector, or complex oil & gas infrastructure.
Why Independence Matters
It’s important to underscore a defining strength of this partnership: both Ternan Energy and Njord Subsea are entirely independent consultancies, bringing unbiased expertise and objective insights to every project.
Ternan is 100% employee-owned. We have no parent company pushing us toward particular technical solutions to benefit their product lines.
Njord operates with the same philosophy – independence from equipment suppliers, fabricators, and installation contractors. No commercial conflicts driving technical recommendations.
This shared commitment to independence means our partnership delivers something rare in today’s offshore energy sector: integrated technical capability without any commercial agenda beyond getting the project right for our client.
When we recommend a foundation type, burial depth, or cable protection system, that recommendation is driven purely by the technical realities of the seabed, the project requirements, and what makes commercial sense for the developer. Nothing else.
What This Means for Clients
Earlier Integration of Expertise
Rather than bringing transmission and geoscience consultants together midway through development, clients can now access both skillsets from the initial feasibility stage onwards. This means cable routes can be planned with full awareness of geotechnical constraints, and foundation designs consider cable approaches and protection systems from the start.
Streamlined Project Interfaces
Fewer consultant boundaries means fewer coordination meetings, clearer technical accountability, and faster resolution when issues span multiple disciplines. One integrated team rather than separate vendors working in parallel.
Comprehensive Site Investigations
We can now design survey scopes that intelligently sequence geotechnical and geophysical data acquisition, ensuring both foundation and cable route requirements are considered holistically from the planning stage. This integrated approach identifies potential data gaps early and ensures investigation strategies support both disciplines effectively.
Risk Reduction Through Shared Knowledge
When your geoscience consultant and your transmission consultant are actively collaborating, risks that sit at the interface between disciplines get identified earlier and managed more effectively.
Commercial Flexibility
Clients can engage us for fully integrated services across the board, or selectively draw on specific expertise where needed. The partnership framework is there, but how clients use it remains flexible.
The Team Behind Njord
We’ve kept a close eye on the offshore energy consultancy space for a while now, and when it came time to choose a partner, we were deliberate. We chose to partner with Njord specifically, because they stood out in both their technical experience and the way they approach the delivery of their solutions.
Njord was founded by Andrew Newman and Benjamin Vick – two professionals with serious offshore credentials. Andrew has over two decades in the marine sector. Ben has extensive experience leading packages in complex EPCI environments at major project scale. These aren’t theorists – they’ve been in the trenches, making offshore wind projects happen.
More importantly, when we met with the Njord team, we immediately recognized a shared philosophy: execution over presentation, results over reports, practical commercial advice over academic perfection. They talk like engineers who’ve had to make real projects work in challenging conditions, because that’s exactly what they are.
That cultural alignment matters enormously. You can write up a great partnership on paper, but it only delivers when both teams trust each other’s technical judgment and share the same drive to do what’s right for the client.
Looking Forward
This partnership comes at a crucial moment for the offshore energy sector. Government commitments are under strain in the face of increasing project costs and supply chain pinch points. If we are to have a decade of growth ahead of us, we need to innovate and think differently.
We believe that growth will only happen if projects can be delivered on time, on budget, and to the exacting technical standards that offshore environments demand. That requires consultancies that can move fast, think across disciplines, and provide clients with advice that’s both technically rigorous and commercially pragmatic.
We’re excited about what this partnership with Njord Subsea enables us to deliver. The offshore energy sector doesn’t need more PowerPoint presentations or generic feasibility studies – it needs hands-on technical expertise that helps clients navigate from site assessment through to successful foundation installation and grid connection.
That’s exactly what we’re building here.
If you’re working on offshore energy projects and want to discuss how this partnership might support your development pipeline, we’d be very happy to talk. Contact us today at info@ternan-energy.com or reach out through our website.
Here’s to building the offshore infrastructure that powers the energy transition.
Ternan Energy is an independent marine geoscience consultancy specialising in geotechnics, geophysics and foundation engineering for offshore wind, subsea interconnectors and oil & gas projects. Winner of Consulting Firm of the Year 2025, we support clients across UK and international waters with commercially-focused technical expertise from our offices in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Peebles, Brighton and Oxford.