GE Vernova-Seatrium Consortium Cuts Steel for TenneT’s IJmuiden Ver Beta Offshore Platform

September 12, 2024, by Adnan Memija

A consortium of GE Vernova and Seatrium has held a steel-cutting ceremony to mark the start of construction work on TenneT’s IJmuiden Ver Beta offshore converter platform, one of the first Dutch 2 GW grid connection projects.

The first steel was cut at Seatrium’s Tuas Boulevard shipyard in Singapore.

The high voltage direct current (HVDC) offshore converter platform will connect the IJmuiden Ver Beta wind farm and will be installed in the Dutch North Sea in 2028.

In June, a joint venture between Vattenfall and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), Zeevonk II, was awarded development permits for the IJmuiden Ver Beta offshore wind site in the Netherlands.

Last year, TenneT selected the GE Vernova-Seatrium consortium to supply the offshore HVDC platforms for the 2 GW Maasvlakte cluster.

GE Vernova is responsible for the 2 GW HVDC system, and Seatrium will engineer and manufacture the platform. In October 2023, engineering company Iv-Offshore & Energy won a contract for the design of the offshore converter platform.

“After years of preparation engineering and procurement in a challenging time, it is a great pleasure to see that the IJmuiden Ver Beta platform will now begin to take physical shape. It is a memorable and proud moment as it is also the very first 2GW platform of which at least 12 are to follow in the next years”, said Jessie van der Linden, Associate Director of Large Projects Offshore (2 GW).

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Once commissioned in 2029, the grid connection will deliver 2 GW of electricity from the IJmuiden Ver Beta offshore wind farm in the North Sea.

The wind power produced offshore will be transported as alternating current to the offshore converter platform using a 66-kV connection.

The converter station converts the alternating current to direct current, which is then transported via a 155-kilometre-long 525 kV cable connection to the onshore converter station at Amaliahaven (Maasvlakte). Here the electricity is converted back into alternating current and fed into the high voltage grid via the converter station.

Under the framework agreement signed with TenneT, the GE Vernova-Seatrium consortium was awarded three Dutch projects, namely IJmuiden Ver Beta, IJmuiden Ver Gamma, and Nederwiek 2, that will be connected to the high voltage grid at Maasvlakte (Rotterdam).