PARTNERING UP FOR INNOVATIVE FLOATING WIND SOLUTIONS

UK firm Tugdock Limited has partnered up with Belgian construction firm Sarens to offer a novel dry dock solution to the fast-growing floating offshore wind industry

The partnership will allow Sarens to accelerate the use of Tugdock’s marine buoyancy bag solution for the build of turbine floaters to offshore wind developers across the world.

“Through this partnership with Tugdock, we are able to streamline the solution we offer to developers. By significantly reducing time and costs, our alliance will deliver a step change for wind turbine construction,” said Carl Sarens, director of technical solutions, projects & engineering at Sarens.

”In addition, Tugdock’s flexibility and reusability is useful to global developers as the units can be reused from one port or project to another regardless of changes in turbine size or foundation weight.”

Enhancing capacity

The floating offshore wind sector is expected to continue to grow rapidly. However, very few of the world’s ports have sufficient water depth and assembly quay space to build the huge turbine floaters required and conventional dry docks are not wide enough as they were originally designed for ships.

”Tugdock’s patented marine buoyancy bag technology solves this issue. It allows floating dry docks to be delivered by road in modular form and assembled at the port to dimensions far wider than most of the world’s existing dry docks,” said Lucas Lowe-Houghton, director of business development for Tugdock.

“Our submersible floating dry docks can operate with as little as five metres draft, enabling more efficient wind turbine floater construction. The platform is then towed to deeper water for launching of the turbines. More than 8% of the total cost of a floating offshore wind farm is accounted for by assembly and installation. So, any innovation that allows this process to be carried out more efficiently and quickly will have a big impact on profitability for developers.”

Floating offshore wind turbines are located in areas where there is deeper water and higher winds than fixed wind turbine structures, enabling them to generate higher levels of power.

This means they are expected to play a key role in the transition to net zero. Over 20 gigawatts of floating offshore wind power is expected to be commissioned globally by 2035, requiring over 2,600 wind turbines.

Final monopile for Hollandse Kust installed

Van Oord has completed the final monopile installation for Dutch wind farm Hollandse Kust, bringing the number of turbine foundations to 70.

The wind farm should generate up to 760MW, which over a year will equate to 3.3TWh.

Weighing between 788 and 960 tonnes, the monopiles have been installed in record time, with the first only completed four months ago, in October.

“During the installation works CrossWind and Van Oord promoted and maintained an open culture, in which we acted as one team. I am convinced that this approach defined a big part of our success in reaching this milestone in a safe and timely manner,” said Wybren de Vries, Balance of Plant Package manager at CrossWind.

As well as working on the monopiles, for which Van Oord deployed DEME’s jack-up

8 Tugdock’s marine buoyancy bag technology allows floating dry docks to be delivered by road in modular form and assembled at the port vessel, Van OOrd also designed, engineered, procured and installed the inter-array cables. Offshore installation vessel MPI Resolution was used to install secondary steel to complete the foundations, which consists of boat landings, main access platforms with davit cranes and internal platforms. These will be used for maintenance activities once the wind farm is operational, when Van Oord’’s cable-laying vessel Nexus will be deployed to install the main cables.

The Hollandse Kust wind farm is part of the Dutch government’s plan to generate 21,000MW of electricity across eight wind farms by 2030, which will equate to a 10-fold increase in offshore wind for the Netherlands.

The world’s first ‘energy island’ is to be built by marine giants Jan De Nul and DEME.

A joint venture between two of the world’s best-known marine contractors has been set up to create the world’s first so-called energy island. It is said to be the first ‘building block’ of an integrated European offshore electricity grid that will connect various hubs and countries together, with Belgium saying it wants to build additional joint interconnections with Great Britain and Denmark.

TM Edison, formed by Jan De Nul and DEME, won the tender for the construction after Belgian utility company Elia received multiple bids from Belgian and foreign companies once the procedure opened in January 2022.

Construction of the foundations of ‘Princess Elisabeth Island’, 45km off the coast of Belgium in the North Sea, will begin early next year and are anticipated to last for 2.5 years.

The contours of the island will be formed by using concrete caissons filled with sand. The base of the island will then be raised and prepared for the electrical infrastructure, with