The North Sea is known to be a prime site for wind development. Several countries have set up wind farms in this location with Great Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and The Netherlands taking the lead in this race for clean energy. The site has great potential and developers are always looking for new ways to make the most of it.
With this in mind the world’s biggest offshore wind platform is about to take shape in the North Sea. There’s a blooming cluster of wind farms in this location and energy developers are hoping to make more efficient the process of bringing power to the grid.
Drydocks World was selected to build the large platform – the size of a football field – for the Norwegian company Aibel, which is expected to be concluded by the end of 2013. It will then be fully outfitted and placed near Helgoland, in the German sector of the North Sea.
The platform will receive alternating current power from a choice of offshore wind farms and convert it to direct current before sending it ashore through cables laid on the sea floor. Another big player in this massive project is ABB, which won a contract to design and install the offshore platform, as well as the offshore and onshore converter stations and the land and sea cables that will carry the power to German’s grid.
The project is one of huge dimensions. Besides the AC cables connecting the wind farms to the converting station, they foresee the need for 25 miles of DC sea cable and almost 60 miles of land cable to the high-voltage direct current (HVDC) system onshore at the grid connection point at Dörpen-West, Germany.
The partners in this scheme believe that the environmental benefits from the project will be note worthy, such as electrical losses of less than 1 percent per converter station and neutral electromagnetic fields. The scheme will be ideal for connecting remote wind farms to mainland networks without distance limitations or constraints on the grid.
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