The first of five wind turbines for the world’s first floating offshore wind farm – Hywind Scotland – has left the project’s assembly base in Stord, Norway, and is now on its way to the site off the coast of Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
Statoil started assembling the Siemens 6MW turbines for the 30MW Hywind Scotland floating wind farm at the assembly site at the beginning of May . The same month, the first two of the five SPAR-type floating foundations, built by the Navantia-Windar consortium, arrived to the project’s assembly base and were unloaded off Stord before being verticalized using ballast water and aggregates, reaching a draft of more than 75 metres.
By the end of June, all five wind turbines were mounted on their respective SPAR floating foundations and moored in the fjord off Leirvik to undergo final tests before being towed one by one to the installation site some 25 kilometres off Peterhead, and installed in water depths of between 90 and 120 metres.
The floating wind turbines have a total height of 258 meters, with 178 metres of the structures floating above water, and the remaining 80 metres submerged underwater.
The floating wind farm is owned by Statoil (75%) and Masdar (25%) and is expected to be commissioned in late 2017.
Offshore WIND Staff