rendering via VARD
As the offshore oil and gas sector continues to struggle while oil and gas firms reduce their CAPEX, offshore contractors and shipowners such as Van Oord and Siem Offshore are expanding their business models into the offshore wind sector, an area that continues to see significant investment.
On Tuesday, Siem Offshore Contractors announced the winning of a contract worth upwards of 100 million euro for the turnkey supply and installation package of the inner array grid cable system for the 400 MW Veja Mate Offshore Wind Farm (OWF).
Lars Muck, Business Area Manager for Siem Offshore Contractors tells gCaptain they will be utilizing the Siem Aimery, a new DP-2, VARD-design cable-lay vessel that is under construction at Remontowa Shipbuilding S.A. in Poland and scheduled for delivery this month.
Muck says the ISV Siem Moxie, with her 3-axis motion compensated crane will be utilized as the installation support vessel during the project.
The Veja Mate OWF is located 115km offshore in the German sector of the North Sea and consists of 67, 154-meter diameter wind turbine generators (WTGs) supplied by Siemens, each with a generating capacity of 6 megawatts. The scope of work for Siem Offshore Contractors involves inter-connecting these WTGs utilizing an array grid of 33 kV medium voltage alternating current (MVAC) submarine composite cables with a total length of up to 97 kilometers.
This OWF will be eventually hooked up to the 800 MW Borwin Beta power transformer platform which was installed in April 2014.
See the Borwin Beta installation in the following video:
Siem Offshore notes in a presentation that wave-related operability issues have historically been a major factor in forcing delays of cable lay operations. They believe the answer to this issue is their USD $85 million Siem Aimery which has a hull design that permits operations in wave heights up to 3 meters plus two cable carousels capable of carrying 4,250 tons of cable, 2 stern launched work-class ROVs and a starboard side deployed trenching ROV. The vessel will be equipped with diesel-electric propulsion system consisting of four main generators providing power to two azimuth propulsion thrusters, two tunnel thrusters and one retractable thruster.
Installation operations are set to commence in 2016.
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