Cargo Drone Takes Trial Run at Dutch Offshore Wind Farm

Ampelmann Operations, in collaboration with Siemens Gamesa, tested a cargo drone at the Hollandse Kust Nord offshore wind farm in the Netherlands this winter, with the drone successfully moving materials from a service operations vessel (SOV) to offshore wind turbines and back again.

According to Ampelmann, the trial campaign, which was carried out in December 2025 from SOV Purus Horizon, was undertaken to test two key innovations developed by the company: unmanned cargo retrieval and automated flight operations.

“Technicians working on the turbines normally have to carry a lot of equipment up to the nacelle of a turbines to effectively do maintenance work. Often more equipment than they actually need, since it is not easy to collect tools from the vessel once they are in the turbine. By pre-loading equipment to the turbine and using the cargo drone to deliver and collect items on demand, crane lifts are reduced and technicians can focus more time on maintenance work, improving efficiency and safety”, Ampelmann said via social media.

Last year, Ampelmann, together with the Dutch Applied Scientific Research Institute (TNO) and Vattenfall, tested AI-powered cargo drones at Vattenfall’s offshore wind farms DanTysk and Sandbank in the German North Sea.

Ampelmann also supported short-range drone flight trials at RWE’s Nordsee Ost offshore wind farm last year. During that campaign, drones delivered loads of up to 30 kilogrammes from an SOV directly to wind turbines. 

The Dutch Hollandse Kust Noord offshore wind farm is located 18.5 kilometres off the coast of Egmond aan Zee and has 69 Siemens Gamesa SG 11.0-200 DD wind turbines.

The 759 MW offshore wind farm went into operation on 20 December 2023.

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