Bauer Renewables to Do Relief Drilling for Beatrice Piles

Seaway Heavy Lifting (SHL) has awarded Bauer Renewables with a subcontract to design, build, test and operate specialized equipment – the BAUER Dive Drill C40 – to execute relief drilling services for the foundation piles at the 588MW Beatrice offshore wind farm in the Outer Moray Firth, Scotland.

SHL will install 84 jackets for the foundations of the wind farm’s Siemens 7MW wind turbines.

Each jacket sits on four piles. The soil conditions are described to be sand and hard clay with occasionally boulders.

Relief drilling may be used when a pile hits early refusal during driving. At that time, the top of the pile will be most likely below water table.

The Bauer Dive Drill C40 will be lifted into the pile, clamp itself to the inside and drill down to pile tip or a certain distance beyond to remove obstructions and to relief the pile from the inside friction. After recovery of the Dive Drill C40, pile driving resumes to drive the pile to final depth.

Bauer Renewables is the UK subsidiary of Bauer Spezialtiefbau GmbH, a German foundation construction specialist. The equipment will be supplied by Bauer Maschinen GmbH, another member of the Bauer Group.

“We are extremely pleased to be involved in such an outstanding project,” said Paul Scheller, Managing Director of BAUER Renewables Ltd.

“The contract marks a further important step for us in the future market of renewable energies and shows that, with our know-how and technology, Bauer is also optimally prepared for challenging foundation projects in the offshore sector.”

In May 2016, SHL and Subsea 7 jointly won an engineering, procurement, construction and installation (EPCI) contract for wind farm turbine foundations and array cables to be installed at the wind farm.

Offshore installation activities will be executed in 2017 and 2018 using Seaway Heavy Lifting’s heavy-lift vessels, Stanislav Yudin and Oleg Strashnov.

Beatrice is being developed by Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Limited (BOWL), a joint venture partnership between SSE (40%), Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (35%) and Red Rock Power Ltd. (25%).

The wind farm is expected to be commissioned in 2019.