Half of the total of 80 wind turbine foundations are now in place at the Saint-Nazaire offshore wind farm in France.
The 80 foundations are being installed by DEME Offshore’s jack-up vessel Innovation , which put the first monopile in place in early May and had more than a quarter of the project’s foundations installed by the end of August. The same month, DEME completed the installation of the project’s offshore substation, the first to be installed in France.
According to DEME, 73 of the wind farm’s XL monopiles have to be drilled through the calcarenite rock at the project site, located between 12 and 20 kilometres off the coast of the Guérande peninsula, which represents an industry first.
For the installation work, DEME Offshore has, for the first time, deployed its 350-tonne Offshore Foundation Drill (OFD) and MODIGA, a solution which allows encapsulating the drilling and installation operations and shields them from the adverse Atlantic marine conditions, according to the company. The OFD was developed together with Herrenknecht, while for the design and development of MODIGA DEME teamed up with TMS.
The Saint-Nazaire offshore wind farm, also known as Parc du Banc de Guérande, will comprise 80 GE Haliade 150-6MW turbines.
The 480 MW project is scheduled to be operational in the summer of 2022 when it will become the first commercial-scale wind farm installed in French waters.
The wind farm is being developed by Eolien Maritime France (EMF), a consortium of EDF Renouvelables, Enbridge, and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.