Half of the wind turbine foundation piles have been installed at the Beatrice offshore wind site, the developer informed via social media. The piling is being carried out by Seaway Heavy Lifting (SHL) with their heavy lift vessel Stanislav Yudin.
The piling works started in April, when Stanislav Yudin arrived at the site.
At a wind turbine location, each of the four piles for a jacket foundation are lifted, upended, lowered into the the Pile Installation Frame (PIF) installed on the seabed and then driven to final penetration by a piling hammer.
Prior to pile-driving, the team undertaking the works at the Beatrice site implements the Piling Mitigation Protocol, which includes the deployment of the Acoustic Deterrence Device (ADD) and a soft start piling procedure.
The jacket foundations are being produced by Smulders, Bladt and BiFab.
According to BOWL’s Notice to Mariners, the piling works are scheduled to take place until the end of October.
The project – developed by a joint venture partnership between SSE (40%), Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (35%) and Red Rock Power Ltd. (25%) – is expected to become fully operational in 2019.
The 588MW wind farm is being constructed with a tier 1 supply chain comprising SHL, Subsea 7, Nexans and Siemens.