Hywind Buoyant on French Connection

French cable maker Nexans has awarded its compatriot, Bardot Group, with a contract to supply buoyancy modules for the power cables of Hywind Scotland, the world’s first floating wind farm.

The 30MW floating wind farm, located 30 kilometres off the coast of Peterhead, will be operated by Norwegian oil and gas major Statoil.

Hywind will consist of five wind turbine generators connected through a cable network. The energy produced by the turbines will then be transferred to land by a single export cable.

The cabling has been awarded to Nexans, who has chosen Bardot Group to equip its dynamic cables with buoyancy modules.

The contract between Nexans and Bardot Group consists of the procurement of several hundreds of buoyancy modules, each providing around 400 kilogrammes of buoyancy and rated for 120 metres of water depth.

The buoyancy modules integrate Bardot’s in-house DeepFloat syntactic foam technology, and will provide flotation assistance in the dynamic sections of the power cables.

The buoyancy modules are to be delivered onsite in May 2017.