SEANEX Connections for Seagreen 1 Offshore Wind Farm

SSE Renewables, together with Vestas, has selected the SEANEX inner cone system from Pfisterer for the connections on more than 100 wind turbines at the Seagreen 1 project, located 27 kilometres off Scotland’s Angus coastline.

According to the supplier, the system offers significant benefits during installation and continuous operation of the 66 kV inter-array cabling.

For the Seagreen 1 offshore wind farm, Pfisterer is supplying SEANEX joints and preassembled and tested cables with SEANEX connectors for the construction. The joints and preassembled cables will link the subsea cables to the gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) in the towers of the projects 114 Vestas 10 MW wind turbines.

As the wind turbines are installed, the pluggable connection between the submarine cable and the tower cable allows for the individual construction phases to be clearly separated.

“The connection system will provide an easier, quicker, cost efficient and safer approach to connect the wind turbine HV network to the array cable infrastructure in a pluggable variant”, said Stephan Kremers, project manager at Vestas. “SEANEX ensures an end-to-end pretested configuration, allowing the possibility to test the entire array cable infrastructure prior to turbine installation, and will last as long as the turbine”.

Kremers added that SEANEX would also reduce the time for connecting the individual wind turbines to the array network, and still allow a primary GIS in the transition piece to become redundant since it is directly connected to the wind turbine HV switchgear.

Seagreen 1, owned by Total and SSE Renewables, will feature 114 Vestas 10 MW turbines, to be delivered in different load optimised modes to adapt to grid requirements for the 1,075 MW project.

The project is expected to be operational in 2022/2023, when it will become Scotland’s largest offshore wind farm.