Construction of Saint-Brieuc offshore wind farm about to kick off

Construction works on the Saint-Brieuc offshore wind farm in France will begin on 3 May, Iberdrola announced on 21 April.

The works, starting with pile installation for the project’s jacket foundations, are planned to take place from May to October in five zones located in the northern part of the wind farm to avoid interfering with the 2020-2021 scallop fishing season, which finishes at the end of April.

The piles will be installed using Van Oord’s vessel Aeolus and will be fixed to the seabed using a drilling technique instead of pile driving to minimise environmental impact.

From June to September, the inter-array cable trenches will be excavated. Ailes Marines, a subsidiary of Spanish Iberdrola developing the project, announced in December 2020 that it would bury all the inter-array cables to allow fishing activities to continue at the site.

Saint-Brieuc construction will be spread over three years and coordinated from Kerantour’s construction base in Pleudaniel in Brittany, as well as from the port of Lézardrieux, from where maritime transport and the transfer of crews to the site will take place.

The 496 MW offshore wind farm is located in the Bay of Saint-Brieuc in Brittany, 16.3 kilometres from the Breton coast. Once operational in 2023, Saint-Brieuc wind farm will produce 1,820 GWh of electricity per year.

The Navantia-Windar consortium is in charge of manufacturing and assembling 62 jacket foundations and accompanying pin-piles which will support Saint-Brieuc’s Siemens Gamesa 8 MW turbines.

Prysmian will supply almost 100 kilometres of three core 66 kV HVAC XLPE-insulated inter-array cables.