A CABLE cleat specialist has strengthened its industry reputation after designing equipment for a major offshore energy development.

Ellis, in Rillington, near Scarborough, worked with Siemens to make clamps for high voltage cables on an electrical substation at the HelWin2 project.

The 690MW scheme is an offshore platform linking the Amrumbank West offshore wind farm and Germany's onshore grid.

Bosses expect it to be operational by 2015 and power hundreds of thousands of homes.

Ellis, founded in 1962 by former RAF bomber pilot Arthur Ellis, made an entirely new product for the work, creating the world's first two-in-one cable guide and clamp.

Richard Shaw, Ellis' managing director, said: “The requirement was to feed seven 117mm diameter cables along a specified route in a structure that featured a significant number of twists and turns.

“However, the problem was that there was no existing product that would enable the cables to be installed in an efficient, safe and cost-effective manner.

“Within six weeks of the initial meeting, Siemens had approved our new product design.

“Two weeks later, five working prototypes successfully passed an installation trial in Germany and less than a month after that we’d received the order and were ready for mass production.”

Ellis’ new cable guide and clamp, known as Triton, guides cables into their final location.

Once the cable is laid correctly, the top half is removed with a fixing piece installed directly on the cable turning the guide into a cable clamp.

Mr Shaw added: “We have always taken great pride in our ability to innovate, but to be asked to do so in a live project situation was certainly a real test of our mettle.

“To come through such a test with Siemens' problem solved, the specification secured and an entirely new product range on the verge of being launched is the kind of result that even I, at my most optimistic, wouldn’t have predicted when we sat in that first meeting looking at the requirements of the project.”

Last month, Ellis secured one of its largest orders after helping expand the Shamiya Haram, part of the holy mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

Workers are quadrupling the mosque's size to cater for more than two million worshippers and Ellis' cleats are being used to secure power cables throughout the building's 75,000sq metre central utility complex.

The company previously sent fire-proof cleats to secure cabling at the 23-storey BP4 Tower, in London's Canary Wharf and cleats and cable straps to the nuclear Areva European Pressurised Reactor factory, in China.