Vattenfall Completes Installation of Final Turbine at Ormonde Offshore Wind Farm (UK)

Vattenfall today completed the installation of the final turbine at its pioneering wind farm off the coast of north-west England.

The 30th turbine at Ormonde Offshore Wind Farm was installed at 3 am with the final rotor lift from A2Sea’s vessel, the SeaJack. Installation was completed four months after the first turbine was erected. The European energy company now looks forward to generating electricity from the wind farm for the first time later this summer.

Ormonde’s 30 REpower 5M wind turbines have a total installed capacity of 150MW. It is capable of generating enough electricity annually to meet the equivalent electricity needs of 100,000 UK households.

Ole Bigum Nielsen, Vattenfall’s head of offshore wind development in the UK, said: “Vattenfall has been pioneering the development of offshore wind for many years, with Ormonde hot on the heels of our recently completed Thanet Offshore Wind Farm, still the world’s largest operating offshore wind farm. Our experience, coupled with the expertise from our construction partners, ode and REpower, has allowed us to develop a wind farm safely and to schedule.”

He added: “Vattenfall’s Ormonde Offshore Wind Farm is the first commercial and largest deployment of Scotland’s Burntisland Fabrications’ steel lattice ‘quadruped’ foundation and REpower’s 5M turbine, the largest commercially available offshore wind turbine in the world. Ormonde Offshore Wind Farm is therefore a sign of things to come as the UK offshore wind industry gears up to deliver its enormous potential.”

Frank Zimmermann, Head of REpower Offshore, said: “We are very pleased and proud to demonstrate with Ormonde that REpower also successfully delivers large-scale offshore projects. We often got commendatory and appreciative feed-back from our project partners on site for our work preparation and our very safety-conscious implementation. This of course motivated us and provided a basis for good teamwork – the key to the success of all projects. That way we were able to complete the installation around three weeks ahead of the schedule.”

Offshore construction of Ormonde Offshore Wind Farm started in 2010 and by the summer of that year all 31 steel lattice quadruped jacket foundations had been installed. The first wind turbine at Ormonde was lifted onto the foundation and installed on 23 March this year. All thirty wind turbines have been installed in little over four months. The additional foundation supports the wind farm’s substation.

The REpower 5M wind turbine started life in a factory in Germany with the components – rotor, nacelle and tower sections – transported to the Harland & Wolff docks in Belfast. From here the turbines were transported two-by-two to the Ormonde site on board the SeaJack which was pulled by two tugs. Each turbine is installed from the A2Sea installation vessel the SeaJack by crane. Depending on the weather, an installation of a single turbine on site can take as little as 12 hours.

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Source: Vattenfall, August 01, 2011;