The onshore control room for the world’s largest floating wind farm, and the first to power oil & gas platforms, has been officially opened in Bergen, Norway.
This is the first offshore wind control room in Norway, according to Ole Arild Larsen, Manager Operations Hywind Tampen at Equinor.
The 94.6 MW Hywind Tampen, which produced first power a few days ago, will power the five Snorre and Gullfaks oil and gas platforms on the Norwegian Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), operated by Equinor and partners.
The power from the first turbine, which was installed in June, was delivered to the Gullfaks A platform in the North Sea on 13 November.
The Hywind Tampen control room is co-located with the control room for Valemon, Equinor’s unmanned platform with separation facilities for gas, condensate and water.
In December 2019, Equinor awarded Wood with a contract for topside modifications necessary for the Snorre A and Gullfaks A platforms to integrate the Hywind Tampen with existing systems powering the facilities.
Wood’s scope of work also included equipment installation on the floating wind turbines and upgrades to the onshore control room in Bergen.
In 2020, Lloyd’s Register was contracted for Human-Machine Interface (HMI) engineering services for the control room from which the Hywind Tampen floating wind farm will be remotely operated, as part of the integrated scope Equinor awarded to Wood.
At the Hywind Tampen offshore site, seven of the total of eleven Siemens Gamesa 8.6 MW wind turbines are scheduled to come on stream during the year. The last four turbines were assembled this autumn and will be installed on the field during a weather window next year.
The floating offshore wind farm was initially scheduled to be completed by the end of 2022, but due to some deviations found in steel quality in four tower sections and supply chain bottlenecks, the completion of the wind farm has been postponed to 2023.