The first foundation for the “Borkum Riffgrund 3” offshore wind farm has been laid, Ørsted and the Jan De Nul Group announced today.
The offshore wind farm with a capacity of 913 MW is located in the German North Sea. “Borkum Riffgrund 3” will be the largest wind farm in German waters to date[ds_preview].
The heavy lift vessel “Les Alizés” of the Jan De Nul Group has installed the first of 83 monopile foundations 53 km off the island of Borkum. The foundations of “Borkum Riffgrund 3” are up to 100 m long and weigh up to 1,500 tons. They will be manufactured by Steelwind in Nordenham and at the Lindø plant of Bladt Industries A/S in Denmark. Next year, a new generation of turbines, the SG 11.0-200 DD offshore wind turbine, will be installed on these foundations.
This installation campaign began immediately after the installation of the last monopile foundation for the “Gode Wind 3” project with a capacity of 253 MW. In total, “Les Alizés” installed 24 monopiles for the future turbines, including one monopile and the top of the offshore substation.
Offshore transformer station required for “Borkum Riffgrund 3”
“Borkum Riffgrund 3” is the first Ørsted wind farm in Germany to be built without an offshore substation (OSS). The new connection concept, which is being implemented together with the transmission system operator TenneT, provides for a direct connection of the wind turbines via 66 kV export cables to TenneT’s offshore converter platform “DolWin5”.
Together with “Gode Wind 3”, “Borkum Riffgrund 3” will have a total capacity of more than 1.1 GW. This almost doubles Ørsted’s installed offshore wind power capacity in Germany to around 2.5 GW. The two wind farms are scheduled to be commissioned in 2024 and 2025 respectively.
“‘With Borkum Riffgrund 3, we are setting new standards for our industry – both in terms of capacity and business model. The new project is the first offshore wind farm in Germany to be awarded a bid of EUR 0 per MWh in the offshore wind tenders. This allows us to directly support our corporate customers in their decarbonization efforts. This is only possible on this scale with renewable energies through offshore wind energy,” says Jörg Kubitza, Managing Director of Ørsted in Germany.
