Germany: RWE Names Offshore Installation Vessel Victoria Mathias

During a festive ceremony in Bremerhaven today, RWE Innogy is naming one of its two offshore installation vessels. The vessel “Victoria Mathias” will build the wind farm “Nordsee Ost” around 30 kilometres north of the island of Heligoland from its base port Bremerhaven.

The wind power station with an installed output of 295 megawatts can supply around 295,000 German households with electricity each year. The installation vessel is the first of its kind worldwide to be able to transport up to four offshore wind turbines of the multi-megawatt class at the same time and then install them at a depth of more than 40 metres.

Although the vessel was built in South Korea, Europe accounts for around 60 percent of created value. The German supply sector alone contributed around 40 percent to the value creation of the “Victoria Mathias”. The order value per vessel was around 100 million euros.

 Peter Terium, deputy CEO of RWE AG: “With the naming of the ”Victoria Mathias” we are ushering in the age of commercial offshore wind energy for RWE in the German North Sea, and eliminating an important bottleneck in the construction of offshore wind farms. We need offshore wind farms in order to initiate a turnaround in energy generation in Germany and Europe. For RWE they are thus an integral part of the energy supply of the future.”

 Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, CEO of RWE Innogy, adds: “The ”Victoria Mathias” is the result of a very fruitful combination of Korean and European, especially German, engineering. German companies account for 40 percent of the added value, and Europe as a whole, more than 60 percent. The work will be completed by the German shipyard company Lloyd Werft, who are our host today. ”Victoria Mathias” and her sister vessel ”Friedrich Ernestine”, which is identical in design, are important elements in the construction of our ambitious offshore pipeline.”

Dagmar Sikorski-Großmann, who officially named the ”Victoria Mathias”: “It is a great honour for me to name the RWE offshore installation vessel. It is an excellent name that signals a new beginning without forgetting about RWE’s roots. I believe that this is a solid basis for success. I wish the vessel and its crew all the best and above all a safe journey.”

The specialised vessel, which is more than 100 metres long and 40 metres wide, is perfectly designed for the construction of offshore wind turbines and is one of the most powerful of its kind. A satellite-controlled navigation system can position the vessel precisely at centimetre accuracy for the construction works at sea. It has extendible steel beams that fix it securely to the seabed, and a crane with 1,000 tons of lifting capacity. On the building site, the vessel thus turns into a jack-up rig, from which foundations and wind turbines can be installed. The installation vessel will transport two foundation structures every two weeks and later to transport and install all 48 wind turbines of the 6 megawatt class.

In addition to the ”Victoria Mathias”, the company also had another vessel built, the ”Friedrich Ernestine”, which is identical in construction. This vessel will build the Gwynt y Môr wind farm (576 megawatts) off the coast of Wales.

In addition to the wind farm “Nordsee Ost”, RWE Innogy is also developing the wind farms “Innogy Nordsee 1, 2 and 3” in the German North Sea. These wind power stations, with a total of around 1,000 megawatts (MW) of installed output, represent the largest planned offshore project off the German coast. They will be built 40 kilometres north of the North Sea island of Juist on an area of around 150 square kilometres.

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Offshore WIND staff, May 21, 2012; Image: rwe