DEME Group’s cable laying and multipurpose vessel Living Stone has completed the installation of 85km of subsea export cable at Elia’s Modular Offshore Grid (MOG).
Living Stone collected the cable at the manufacturer Hellenic Cable in Greece, transported it to the project site in Belgium and carried out cable installation, offshore jointing and four pull-ins.
The cable now connects Elia’s Offshore Switch Yard (OSY) to the Stevin onshore station at Zeebrugge, as well as the offshore substation of the Rentel wind farm.
DEME also deployed the new trailing suction hopper dredger Bonny River on the project to backfill 45km of trenches.
According to the company, the work has been completed well ahead of schedule.
“It was great to see all plans worked out without any set back,” said Marco Kanaar , Project Director at DEME Offshore. “Usually with a new, complex vessel such as the ‘Living Stone’ you might expect some teething problems, however it was great to see that our crew had already ironed out any potential issues beforehand.”
MOG, scheduled to be operational this September, will connect the Rentel, Northwester 2, and Seamade offshore wind farms to the Belgian grid.
It includes the OSY located about 40km off the Zeebrugge coast, to which the wind farms will be connected, with the export submarine cables linking the OSY to a substation in Belgium.