This October, Ecosse Subsea Systems (ESS) officially completed its work at the Wikinger offshore wind farm under a contract with Prysmian, the company in charge of the supply and installation of the inter-array cables at the 350MW German wind farm.
Ecosse Subsea wrapped up its contract after finishing all the follow-on work, including engineering, with the main pre-cable laying works carried out in autumn of the last year.
In 2015, Prysmian awarded the Scottish company a contract to carry out pre-cut seabed trenching for cable laying at Iberdrola’s Wikinger offshore wind farm. The initial contract then doubled in scope in 2016 with the award of seabed clearance and route preparation work prior to commencing the trenching operations, after surveys discovered a number of obstacles on the proposed route.
The campaign took place over 116 days with ESS deploying its SCAR1 Seabed System and dealing with extremely varied seabed and shallow soil conditions. The route preparation phase involved thousands of boulders being cleared over a total distance of 34km covering 45 inter-array routes, followed by pre-cut trenching over a length of 83km in single and multi-pass modes.
Prysmian completed the laying phase of the inter-array cables ahead of schedule in March 2017, and the project saw all of its 70 Adwen 5MW wind turbines installed at their respective locations on 22 October.
Offshore WIND Staff