During a press conference at WindEnergy Hamburg last week, Vattenfall stated that they will launch the Sandbank project in the summer of 2015, after they complete the DanTysk construction works.
Due to their proximity and technical similarity of DanTysk and Sandbank, Vattenfall has come up with the concept to have one crew servicing both wind farms from one offshore accommodation platform.
“The idea is to have a hotel out there and reduce the travel time for the service people once we are operational,” said Gunnar Groebler, Chief of the Renewables Business Unit in the Continental / UK regional unit at Vattenfall.
Mr. Groebler added that they don’t have a partner for this concept as they are planning to do it themselves.
The Sandbank project will comprise 72 Siemens 4MW turbines with a total electrical generating capacity of 288 MW.
Even though Siemens offers a larger 6MW wind turbine model, Vattenfall has chosen the 4MW model because the larger one wasn’t available at the time of the decision making. Beside this fact, the grid connection capacity was also a limiting factor.