Borssele 3 & 4 offshore wind farm ready to officially enter operation

The 731.5 MW Borssele 3 & 4 wind farm off the Netherlands will be officially handed over to the Operations team on Thursday, 18 February, as all construction phase-related activities have been completed and the wind farm is now generating electricity in full capacity.

The first of the project’s 77 MHI Vestas 9.5 MW turbines was installed at the end of May 2020 and by the end of November 2020 all the wind turbines were in place. The first power was produced in August last year.

In November 2020, the wind farm also saw 2,400 flat oysters being placed around the foundations of its wind turbines as part of a joint initiative of De Rijke Noordzee and the developer. The aim is to investigate whether oysters can establish themselves permanently at the wind farm and whether creating oyster reefs will attract other marine life such as lobsters, crabs and fish.

Borssele 3 & 4 has been built by the Blauwwind consortium, which won the tender to develop the project in December 2016 with an offered price of 5.45 Eurocents/kWh. The consortium comprises Partners Group (45%), Shell (20%), DGE (15%), Eneco Group (10%), and Van Oord (10%), with the latter also being the Balance of Plant (BoP) contractor.

Offshore construction at the project site, located some 55 kilometres off Vlissingen, started in October 2019, when Van Oord’s offshore installation vessel Aeolus installed the first monopile. The vessel was also deployed to install the wind farm’s turbines.

Borssele 3 & 4 is expected to produce around 3 TWh of electricity per year, enough to power the equivalent of 825,000 Dutch households, or to meet up to 2.3 per cent of total Dutch electricity demand.