Germany: TenneT Compensates for Impact on Nature

From July 1 to September 27, excavators rolled into Leybucht to move 33,000 cubic meters of soil and thus create the conditions for the Mittelplate, Germany’s largest oil field located in environmentally important Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea National Parks, to recover to its original state.

This measure was taken by the transmission system operator TenneT. TenneT is responsible for the connection of large offshore wind farms in the North Sea to the German power grid. Within these projects, everything is done to make the necessary interventions in nature as low as possible. To compensate for some inevitable impacts on nature, TenneT, in close coordination with the National Park Administration Lower Saxon Wadden Sea and the Lower Saxony Water Management, Coastal Defence and Nature Conservation Agency (NLWKN), is carrying out numerous conservation projects in the affected areas. This includes compensation measures on the Mittelplate and the compensation for the impairments caused by the offshore grid connections BorWin2, DolWin1 and Riffgat.

Now, the compensation measures carried out by the company G. Herfeld GmbH and planned and supervised by the planning group Grün GmbH, have been completed and accepted by representatives of NLWKN, the National Park Authority and the Aurich county.

From 2014, TenneT will commission a ten-year monitoring scale. In addition to documenting the changes in morphology, periodic vegetation mapping and mapping of breeding birds will be carried out as well.

[mappress]

Offshore WIND Staff, November 4, 2013; Image: tennet