Heavy lift vessel Stanislav Yudin has installed more than three quarters of the foundation piles on the 588MW Beatrice wind farm off Scotland, Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Ltd (BOWL), reports.
Seaway Heavy Lifting’s vessel installed the first batch of the foundation piles in early April. The piles are being delivered by a cargo barge from the manufacturing site directly to Stanislav Yudin at the offshore construction site in the Outer Moray Firth in sets of eight.
They are then lifted and transferred to Stanislav Yudin’s deck. At a wind turbine location, each of the four piles for a jacket foundation is lifted, upended, lowered into NAMI’s purpose built 700-tonne Pile Installation Frame (PIF) and then hammered in.
The piling works are expected to be completed by the end of October.
Beatrice is located on the North Western point of the Smith Bank, approximately 13km off the Caithness coastline.
The development site will cover an approximate area of up to 130km2 and will consist of 84 Siemens 7MW turbines and two Siemens Offshore Transformer Modules installed on jacket foundations, the first of which were installed by SHL’s Oleg Strashnov earlier this month.
The GBP 2.6bn offshore wind project, owned by SSE (40%), Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) (35%) and Red Rock Power Ltd. (25%), is scheduled to be commissioned in 2019.
The wind farm is being developed with a tier 1 supply chain comprising Seaway Heavy Lifting, Subsea 7, Nexans and Siemens.