Final Turbines Head to World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm

DEME Offshore’s jack-up Sea Installer has left the Port of Hull loaded with the last batch of turbine components to be installed at the 1.32 GW Hornsea Two – soon to be the world’s largest offshore wind farm in operation.

Sea Installer and Sea Challenger have been transporting the wind farm’s 165 Siemens Gamesa 8.4 MW turbines from Siemens Gamesa’s facilities in Hull and installing them at the site some 89 kilometres north-east of Grimsby, the UK, since May.

Sea Installer is expected to reach the installation site at around 3 pm UTC, Friday, 31 December. Sea Challenger is currently at the installation site.

Seeing that these will be the final runs for both vessels on the project, it is safe to assume that Hornsea Two has already claimed the top spot in terms of the installed capacity from its sister project – the 1.2 GW Hornsea One.

Hornsea Two is being developed by Ørsted and is scheduled to be fully commissioned in the first half of 2022.

The wind farm delivered first power to the UK grid earlier this month.

First power was achieved after the wind farm’s offshore substation, the world’s largest offshore AC substation, and reactive compensation station (RCS), were installed in late October 2021.

Once fully completed, power will be transferred from the 165 wind turbines via 373 kilometres of array cables to the OSS and RCS, reaching the national grid via 390 kilometres of offshore and 40 kilometres of onshore export cables which terminate at the onshore substation in Killingholme.

A further two projects in the Hornsea Zone are also underway with Hornsea 3 receiving a Development Consent Order in December 2020 and Hornsea 4 currently going through the planning process.