Van Oord has installed the last jacket foundation on the East Anglia ONE offshore wind farm and delivered it to client ScottishPower Renewables.
This marks the marine contractor’s completion of its work for this 714MW UK wind project.
As the main contractor, Van Oord transported and installed all 102 foundations. This is the largest number of three-legged wind turbine foundations ever installed offshore, the company said.
The lion’s share of the work took place at a depth of more than 40 metres in the North Sea at a location where the seas are often rough, the current strong, and visibility minimal, Van Oord said.
In order to be able to install wind turbine foundations in these conditions, Van Oord developed a pile-driving template. The team used this template to drive the anchoring piles for each three-legged jacket foundation into the seabed with millimetre precision. Subsequently, the wind turbine foundations could be installed in the piles.
”Thanks to our ingenious working methods, the expertise of our project team and close cooperation with our partners and our client, we succeeded in installing all jacket foundations for wind farm East Anglia One smoothly and safely. We are proud to contribute to the UK’s energy transition,” Arnoud Kuis , Director Offshore Wind at Van Oord.
ScottishPower Renewables outsourced the manufacture of the jacket foundations and anchoring piles to suppliers in the United Kingdom, Spain, and the Middle East. Van Oord was involved in the logistics and transported some of the foundations to BOW Terminal Vlissingen, the storage and transhipment port for the wind turbine foundations.
Scheduled to be commissioned in 2020, East Anglia ONE comprises 102 Siemens Gamesa 7MW wind turbines currently being installed at the site some 45 kilometres off the Suffolk Coast.