Jacket Installation Resumes at Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm

Seaway Heavy Lifting’s (SHL) vessel Oleg Strashnov will return to the Beatrice site on 16 November and will continue installing jacket foundations until mid-December, when it will leave the site once again and SHL’s vessel Stanislav Yudin will take over. 

In the first jacket foundation installation campaign, Oleg Strashnov has put in place 24 of the total of 86 jacket foundations, while Stanislav Yudin has been working on the piling for the jackets and has two more pile sets left to install.

Before a jacket is installed, the inside of the pile needs to be clean so that the grout bonds between the jacket stab in and the internal pile wall.

For this purpose, pile cleaning is undertaken prior to jacket installation to ensure there is no soil remaining on the inside surface of the pile after soil plug removal. Inside pile cleaning will be performed by means of a combination of steel brushes and high pressure water jets.

The jackets will be delivered to the Beatrice site in a vertical secured position on a cargo barge, which will be moored alongside Oleg Strashnov.

The heavy-lift vessel will then lift a jacket from the cargo barge onto its deck, from where the jacket is then lifted and lowered so that the connection between the seabed piles and the jacket legs is made before grouting is conducted.

The 588MW offshore wind farm will consist of 84 Siemens 7MW wind turbines and two Siemens Offshore Transformer Modules (OTMs), all placed on top of jacket foundations.

The first wind turbines are expected to be installed in summer 2018, with the wind farm anticipated to be commissioned by the end of 2019.