Dredging, Environmental and Marine Engineering (DEME) has completed the installation of 58 monopile foundations and two offshore substation foundations at the SeaMade offshore wind farm in the Belgian North Sea.
Installation works kicked off in September 2019 with DEME’s offshore installation vessel Innovation landing the last foundation on the seabed on January 2 this year.
Turbine installation will start in spring 2020 with offshore installation vessel Apollo and with the port of Ostend as load-out port for the Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy 8,4 MW turbines.
DEME will also install all inter-array cables with cable lay vessel Living Stone after having installed the export cable.
During foundation installation a new monopile gripper has been deployed, enabling Innovation to install monopile foundations all year round. Furthermore, for the vessels’s next project a noise mitigation system will be integrated for minimising subsea noise during installation activities, DEME said.
“This is a major milestone in the construction of Belgium’s largest wind farm. SeaMade is a significant step in the country’s energy transition, ” says Bart De Poorter , general manager DEME Offshore. “ Thanks to the expertise of the teams involved we safely and efficiently completed this project phase. This was also the first successful installation project with the new innovative pile gripper. We now prepare for a successful inter-array cable and turbine installation campaign .”