JIF Breizh completes work at Formosa 2 offshore wind farm

JIFMAR Offshore Services’ shallow draft DP1 workboat JIF Breizh has completed operations at the Formosa 2 offshore wind farm in Taiwan, under a contract with Jan De Nul.

The vessel, which was contracted and transported to Taiwan earlier this year, worked on export cable pull-in landfall Horizontal Direction Drilling (HDD) operations for three months.

Within its scope of work, JIF Breizh needed to fall dry multiple times in order to collect the HDD drill head, which required a lot of pre-engineering both from Jan De Nul and JIFMAR Offshore Services’ engineering departments, according to the vessel owner.

The company signed a contract Jan De Nul, the EPCI contractor for the project’s foundations and subsea cables, in early 2020 and in less than a month later the vessel was prepared and loaded onto a heavy lift vessel in Antwerp, Belgium. JIF Breizh arrived in the Port of Taichung after a 38-day journey and started working on the project site.

“Mobilization of the crew was achieved in difficult conditions as global Pandemic of COVID-19 started during the transit and had a severe impact on our activities. Despite the strict travel restrictions in place, we were able to create a crew change rotation involving several quarantine procedures in place”, JIFMAR Offshore Services stated.

The construction of the 376 MW Formosa 2 offshore wind farm started in June with onshore and nearshore works for the landfall site. The following month, the first pin piles for the wind farm’s jacket foundations were offloaded at the Port of Taichung.

The installation of the project’s subsea cables is scheduled to begin next year.

Formosa 2 – developed by a partnership between JERA, Macquarie’s Green Investment Group, and Swancor Renewable Energy – will comprise 47 Siemens Gamesa 8 MW turbines which are scheduled to be commissioned in 2021.