Equinor has awarded Ocean Installer a contract for the installation of dynamic inter-array cables on the Hywind Tampen floating offshore wind farm in Norway.
The Norwegian company has been contracted to transport and install five 2.5-kilometre-long dynamic inter-array cables in water depths between 260 and 300 metres.
These cables will connect existing turbines in the field to four new wind turbines being installed and commissioned in 2023, bringing the wind farm up to its full capacity of 88 MW.
“Securing this work is a key step in delivering Ocean Installer’s strategy of leveraging our extensive marine construction experience from complex Oil and Gas projects to enter the floating wind market. The global floating wind industry is on the verge of commercialization, and it is very encouraging to see that our capabilities are so readily transferable to this new market”, said Kevin Murphy , CEO of Ocean Installer.
Ocean Installer will make use of the construction support vessel (CSV) Normand Vision equipped with an underdeck carousel and Vertical Lay System for the installation of the cables.
The Hywind Tampen floating offshore wind project is the first wind farm that will supply electricity to oil and gas platforms.
The project has a system capacity of 88 MW and is expected to meet 35 per cent of the electrical power demand on the Gullfaks and Snorre fields. This will cut CO2 emissions from the fields by about 200,000 tonnes per year, according to Equinor.
A milestone was reached when the first subsea cables were laid by Subsea 7 and the connection was made to Gulfaks A in July 2022.
The power from the first wind turbine, which was installed in June last year, was delivered to the Gullfaks A platform in the North Sea on 13 November 2022.
The floating offshore wind farm was initially scheduled to be completed by the end of 2022, but due to some deviations found in steel quality in four tower sections and supply chain bottlenecks, the completion of the wind farm has been postponed to 2023.