BlueFloat, Renantis Award Surveys Contract for Floating Wind Sites Offshore Scotland

April 6, 2023, by Adnan Memija

Acteon Geo-services brands, TerraSond and Benthic, have been awarded a combined geophysical and geotechnical survey by the BlueFloat Energy and Renantis partnership for its Bellrock and Broadshore offshore wind farms, located northeast of Aberdeen, Scotland.

The geophysical scope will involve using the Ocean Fortune, a survey vessel designed specifically for year-round North Sea operations, which TerraSond has on long-term charter.

Local content will be provided from Acteon’s broad asset base in Aberdeenshire and Acteon Geo-services brand UTEC’s in house-data centre in Livingston, West Lothian.

In addition, Benthic’s seafloor drilling solution, portable remotely operated drill (PROD), will be deployed on both ScotWind projects.

“Our early involvement will provide detailed engineering and data interpretation services to help all project participants understand the seafloor composition and structure. The integration of these studies under a single contract minimises interfaces and creates significant efficiencies for our clients”, said Sudhir Pai, Executive Vice President of Acteon Data and Robotics Division.

This award will be the first offshore wind site investigation for TerraSond in the North Sea and the first combined geophysical and geotechnical win for these Acteon Geo-services brands.

“The combination of TerraSond’s geophysical, Benthic’s geotechnical and UTEC’s local content data handling and positioning services from our Geo-services segment enables Acteon to offer a differentiated service”, said Joseph Gagliardi, Managing Director of TerraSond.

BlueFloat Energy and Renantis, previously known as Falck Renewables, secured the two sites in the ScotWind seabed leasing round, together with one more that they are developing in partnership with Ørsted.

The Broadshore offshore wind project was initially planned to have a capacity of up to 500 MW. This was later increased to 900 MW as the plans for the turbine layout were reworked using larger, more efficient wind turbines, according to BlueFloat Energy.

BlueFloat Energy and Renantis also plan to install 1.2 GW floating wind capacity through their Bellrock project which is located off the coast of Aberdeen.

The wind measurement campaign is currently underway with Eolos deploying two of its FLS200 floating LiDAR buoys at two sites offshore Scotland.