All turbines in at Baltic Sea's biggest offshore wind power plant
Vattenfall's 604MW Kriegers Flak array off Denmark to boost country's wind power output by 16%
Dutch contractor Jan de Nul has completed the installation of the last of the 72 Siemens Gamesa 8.4MW turbines making up Vattenfall’s 604MW Kriegers Flak offshore wind project in the Danish part of the Baltic Sea.
The array, located on the maritime border with neighbouring nations Germany and Sweden, will become both the Baltic Sea's and Denmark’s largest wind farm once fully operational, currently slated before the end of this year. It will also at once increase Denmark’s wind power output by 16%.
“Despite the winter weather conditions and extra challenges due to Covid-19, the works have always been on schedule, thanks to their efforts.”
Kriegers Flak is adjacent to the in-operation 288MW EnBW Baltic 2 wind farm off Germany. Sweden originally had planned to also build a wind farm on its side of the three-way sea border – and all three wind farms were planned to be connected to all three countries – but the this project has been on ice as the country’s offshore wind programme hasn’t advanced for years due to lack of government support.
'Efficient jacking procedure'
Jan de Nul said soil conditions at the Kriegers Flak site are extremely heterogeneous, with large lateral variability and boulders on the surface and below – conditions also found at some other Baltic Sea sites, but the company nevertheless manged to execute the project ahead of schedule.
“Thanks to elaborate preliminary geophysical and geotechnical studies and with the help of an in-house calibrated leg penetration model, we managed to engineer an efficient jacking procedure,” Reynvoet said.
In 2017-28, Jan de Nul built, towed and installed two large gravity based foundations for the offshore substations at Kriegers Flak, which are connected by some 170km of subsea cables connect the wind farm to the Danish power grid.