On 11 May, Seaway Heavy Lifting (SHL) installed the 11th set of jacket foundation piles at the Beatrice offshore wind farm in Outer Moray Firth.
The 580MW offshore wind farm will consist of 84 Siemens 7MW offshore wind turbines and two HVAC Offshore Transformer Modules (OTMs).
The first two sets of piles installed were the ones that will later accommodate the foundations for the OTMs.
Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Ltd (BOWL) announced the start of the piling works on 27 March. After the arrival of SHL’s heavy lift vessel Stanislav Yudin at the site on 1 April, the Pile Installation Frame (PIF) was installed at the seabed and the first piles were then driven to final penetration.
At a wind turbine/OTM location, each of the four piles for a jacket foundation is lifted, upended, lowered into the 700-tonne PIF and then hammered in.
The jacket foundations are being produced by Smulders, Bladt and BiFab.
According to BOWL’s Notice to Mariners, the piling works are scheduled to take place until the end of October.
The project – developed by a joint venture partnership between SSE (40%), Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (35%) and Red Rock Power Ltd. (25%) – is expected to become fully operational in 2019.
The wind farm is being constructed with a tier 1 supply chain comprising SHL, Subsea 7, Nexans and Siemens.