Pacific Orca Installs First Turbine at Beatrice OWF

Swire Blue Ocean’s jack-up vessel Pacific Orca has installed the first of the total of 84 Siemens Gamesa 7MW wind turbines at the Beatrice offshore wind farm site in the Outer Moray Firth, Scotland. 

The vessel, mobilised for the project on 26 June, is loading turbine components at the Nigg port, where Siemens Gamesa has set up its pre-assembly site.

Pacific Orca is carrying five sets of turbines at once to the construction site, where they are being installed in a pre-programmed installation sequence.

The turbine commissioning is taking place immediately after each of the turbines is installed and is being carried out using a combination of the walk-to-work vessel Island Crown and crew transfer vessels (CTV) Fob Swath 3 and Seacat Resolute.

Siemens Gamesa will also install and commission the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for the operation of the wind turbines.

Seaway Heavy Lifting’s vessel Oleg Strashnov installed the 86th and final jacket foundation earlier this month. The 86 jacket foundations will support 84 Siemens Gamesa 7MW wind turbines and two Siemens Offshore Transmission Modules (OTMs), already installed at the offshore wind farm.

The 588MW project, to be commissioned in 2019, is being developed by Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Limited (BOWL), a joint venture partnership between SSE, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Red Rock Power Ltd.

Offshore WIND Staff