The foundations for the Nordsee Ost wind farm were loaded for the first time at the quay of RWE’s base port at Bremerhaven. This optimises the company’s port logistics and will reduce the time required to load the company’s installation vessel by some 12 hours in the future.
The first six of the huge foundations, each with a height of up to 50 meters and a weight of some 550 metric tons, were transported to the site of RWE’s base port in the last two days. The so-called jacket foundations are intended for the Nordsee Ost offshore wind farm. In the next few weeks, they are to be loaded onto the Victoria Mathias installation vessel and will be transported to the construction site of the wind farm some 30 kilometres north of the island of Heligoland where they will be installed afterwards. 22 more foundations are to follow by the late autumn.
“We have all worked hand in hand and succeeded in safely unloading the huge foundations in just two days and taking them to their place of storage,” explained Marcus Dengler, Head of Bremerhaven Port Logistics at RWE Innogy . “So far, we loaded the foundations to our installation vessel at Kaiserhafen, and the steel piles to stabilise the foundation were stored at our base port. As a result, loading always involved going to two locations. In the future, we will be able to handle everything from the quay of our base port which will reduce the loading process by some 12 hours.”
The jacket foundations were produced by the company Kvaerner at Verdal in Norway and were towed on a pontoon to Bremerhaven. The structure of jacket foundations is similar to a conventional high-voltage pylon: steel pipes create a three-dimensional lattice structure. Four leg piles anchor the jacket in the sea bed. This design makes the jackets particularly suitable for installation in deep water and for the high loads of the new 6-megawatt wind power systems.
At the site of RWE’s base port, the jacket foundations were lifted by the Matador 3 floating crane directly onto the self-propelled modular transporter (SPMT) and taken to the place of storage.
For two years, RWE Innogy has been using a quay length of 400 meters as well as terminal space of the Eurogate container terminal at Bremerhaven for the transshipment and the storage of offshore wind power components required for the construction of the Nordsee Ost wind farm.
At present, 18 out of a total of 48 foundations are installed in the construction area of the Nordsee Ost wind farm. The installation of the wind turbines is due to start next spring. The Victoria Mathias installation vessel will be used also for the installation of the wind turbines. At present, the availability of Victoria Mathias is almost 100 percent.
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Press release, June 21, 2013; Image: RWE