Olympic Commander deployed for inter-array cables O&M at Sandbank OWF

The multi-purpose offshore vessel Olympic Commander has been contracted by JDR Cables to support a maintenance campaign at the Sandbank offshore wind farm in the German North Sea.

Equipped with a 28-metre Safeway Seagull walk-to-work gangway system, the vessel has been deployed to carry out the transfer of people and goods at the offshore wind farm.

Within the maintenance project, which started in September, Olympic Commander is providing access for JDR technicians maintaining the inter-array cables between the offshore substation and the wind farm’s 72 Siemens Gamesa wind turbines.

The cables also contain an optical fiber that allows for the data exchange between each wind turbine and the OSS, and for the remote control and surveillance of the wind farm from Vattenfall’s Control Center in Esbjerg, Denmark.

The 288 MW Sandbank offshore wind farm, located 90 kilometres west of the island of Sylt in the German part of the North Sea, has been in operation since 2017.

The wind farm is the second joint project between Vattenfall and Stadtwerke München, who had already jointly built the DanTysk wind farm before building Sandbank.