Offshore specialists make progress on major German wind farm

Jan De Nul’s heavy-lift vessel Les Alizés installing the first monopile at the Borkum Riffgund 3 offshore wind farm. Photo: Jan De Nul

Located 53km off the island of Borkum, this project, with a capacity of 913MW, is set to become the largest wind farm in German waters.

Jan De Nul Group’s heavy-lift vessel, Les Alizés, installed the first of 83 monopile foundations required for the wind farm.

The foundations – manufactured by Steelwind in Nordenham and Bladt Industries’ Lindø plant in Denmark – are up to 100m in length and weigh up 1,500 tonnes.

The Les Alizés vessel recently completed the installation of 24 monopiles at the 253MW Gode Wind 3 project, before transitioning to Borkum Riffgrund 3.

Innovative design

The project is the first of Ørsted’s German wind farms to be built without an offshore substation (OSS). Instead, the connection concept – developed in collaboration with transmission system operator TenneT – directly connects the wind turbines via 66kV export cables to the DolWin5 offshore converter platform.

The monopile foundations will support a new generation of offshore wind turbines (SG 11.0-200 DD), set to be installed next year.

Together, the two wind farms will contribute over 1.1GW to Germany’s offshore wind power capacity and almost double Ørsted’s total installed capacity in Germany to approximately 2.5 GW.

Construction of both wind farms is expected to be completed in 2024 and 2025.