Tideway BV, a subsidiary of the Belgian dredging, environmental and marine engineering group DEME, announced with pride that the company has been awarded a Design and Build cable installation contract by DONG Energy for the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Hornsea Project One.

Tideway will deploy DEME’s newest DP3 vessel Living Stone for this project; the most advanced subsea cable-laying vessel in the world, which is currently being built by the Spanish shipyard LaNaval near Bilbao, Spain. Delivery of the vessel, which is equipped with dual fuel engines where LNG is the primary fuel, is scheduled for April 2017.

DONG Energy awards DEME’s subsidiary Tideway Design and Build cable installation contract

The installation scope of work for Tideway includes cable-laying, pre-trenching, backfilling, pre-sweeping, route preparation and rock placement of three high voltage subsea power cables from the shore to three different offshore substation platforms, as well as the installation of two interlink cables. The power cables will be pulled ashore near Horseshoe Point immediately south of the Humber Estuary.

Due to the extreme length of the three subsea power cables (134 km, 140 km and 152 km), DONG Energy has to install a reactive compensation platform between the three substations and the shore. The interlink cables are 13 km and 14 km.

The offshore project execution starts in 2017 with the engineering route survey and the last export cable will be laid and protected mid 2019.

DONG Energy will build the giant Hornsea Project One offshore wind farm, capable of powering well over 1 million UK homes, off the Yorkshire Coast in the UK. Covering approximately 407 square kilometres and providing a capacity of 1.2 gigawatts (GW), Hornsea Project One will be the first offshore wind farm to exceed 1 GW in capacity and will become – by a considerable margin – the world's largest offshore wind farm.

Duncan Clark, Senior Programme Director for DONG Energy’s Hornsea Project One, said: “We are pleased to be able to call on the experience of Tideway for this vital cable installation and pre-trenching work. This activity will take us another step towards the construction of the world’s largest offshore wind farm.”

Hugo Bouvy and Lucas Bols, both directors of Tideway stated: “We are delighted to be expanding our relationship with DONG Energy from the offshore oil and gas market to the key growth area of offshore wind. This is a major contract, for which the highly innovative, modular cable/umbilical handling system positioned on board our state-of-the-art new cable installation vessel Living Stone was the basis. The award is a testament to the confidence DONG Energy has in the capability of our dedicated engineering team and their novel solutions. Uniquely, ‘Living Stone’ has a 10,000 tonne cable capacity divided over two turntables arranged below deck, which meets the project’s specific challenges, helping DONG Energy to bring down the risk and cost of this huge offshore wind development. We look forward to a successful campaign.”

Source: DONG Energy