Seaway Heavy Lifting’s Stanislav Yudin has installed the second set of piles for jacket foundations at the 580MW Beatrice offshore wind farm in Outer Moray Firth, Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Ltd (BOWL) said.
The piles are being delivered by a cargo barge from BiFab’s manufacturing site in Arnish directly to the installation vessel at the offshore construction site in sets of eight.
They are then lifted and transferred to Stanislav Yudin’s deck. At a wind turbine location, each of the four piles for a jacket foundation is lifted, upended, lowered into NAMI’s purpose built 700-tonne Pile Installation Frame (PIF) and then hammered in.
Beatrice is located on the North Western point of the Smith Bank, approximately 13 km off the Caithness coastline. The development site will cover an approximate area of up to 130km and will consist of 84 WTG Jacket Substructures for Siemens 7MW turbines.
Seaway Heavy Lifting (SHL) and Subsea 7 have teamed up on a GBP 1.3 billion EPCI contract for wind farm turbine foundations and array cables to be installed at Beatrice. The two companies are in charge of project managing, designing, engineering, fabricating and installing jacket foundations and array cables at the site, as well as performing the transportation and installation of the offshore transmission modules.
The GBP 2.6bn offshore wind project is owned by SSE (40%), Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) (35%) and Red Rock Power Ltd. (25%).
The wind farm is being developed with a tier 1 supply chain comprising SHL, Subsea 7, Nexans and Siemens, and is scheduled to be fully operational by 2019.
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