Siemens Awards Offshore Converter Platform Contract to Nordic Yards (Germany)

Nordic Yards, manufacturer of innovative special ships and major maritime projects, including for the offshore wind industry, has received a further order from Siemens Energy to build a self-erecting offshore HVDC converter platform.

Work will start from May 2, 2012 on the SylWin alpha platform, which has the construction number 210 and consists of two main components – topside and foundation.

The topside, which contains the converter equipment, workshops, machine rooms, helicopter deck and living quarters, and the foundation, on which the topside is installed in the North Sea, will be manufactured and optimised in both yards to meet the project’s high quality requirements and tight programme deadlines. The yards at Wismar and Warnemünde currently employ a total of 941 staff, who are working on the new SylWin alpha project and the ongoing construction of the converter platforms BorWin beta and HelWin alpha.

The end customer, German-Dutch transmission grid operator TenneT, has commissioned a consortium comprising Siemens Energy and Prysmian Powerlink with the construction of the grid connection. The total investment is almost a billion euros.

The offshore platform is designed to feed up to 864 megawatts of renewable energy into the German power grid from the North Sea. The converter platform has a total height of almost 80 metres, is 56 metres wide and 82.5 metres long. The fully fitted-out topside weighs the equivalent of 25 Airbus A380s and can be installed without the use of a heavy-lift vessel.

Following completion of the topside and foundation at the two yards, the components are transported on barges (transport pontoons) with the help of tugs across the Baltic Sea to the final installation site approximately 70 kilometres west of Sylt.

“Nordic Yards impressed us with the quality and reliability of its work on the earlier projects. Therefore we are looking forward to a third joint platform project,” says Wolfgang Winter, Project Director at Siemens Energy.

 Vitaly Yusufov, owner and Managing Director of Nordic Yards, adds: “We are proud that Siemens decided once more to make us its partner for this project. I would like to thank all employees for their efforts in making this order possible. With SylWin alpha we are significantly and sustainably strengthening our position in the market for innovative offshore solutions and clearly underlining our development as a specialised shipyard.”

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Offshore WIND staff, February 06, 2012; Image:nordicyards