The offshore converter platform, BorWin gamma, has now safely set sail from Dubai and begun its journey to its offshore site in the German part of the North Sea.
Through the Gulf of Oman, the 18,000 ton ‘topside’ will pass into the Red Sea before going through the Suez Canal onto the Mediterranean and past Gibraltar. The journey then moves through the Bay of Biscay, to the English Channel and into the North Sea where it will be integrated with the ‘jacket’ nearly 130 kilometres off the German coast.
Along with BorWin3, a 900-megawatt connection for two offshore wind farms will go into operation next year and be able to supply more than one million households.
It will be one of the world’s heaviest and largest HVDC platforms, with the topside six storeys high, weighing in at 20,000 tonnes and about the size of half a football pitch.
Construction of the BorWin3 platform took place in Drydocks World, Dubai, which extends across an impressive 10 square kms. The topside took over 13.5 million man-hours to construct and used 10,500 tonnes of steel – more than the Eiffel Tower.
TenneT ordered the HVDC platform for its BorWin3 offshore grid connection project in 2014, from a consortium comprising Petrofac and Siemens, with Siemens in charge of supplying the complete HVDC converter technology and main electrical equipment, and Petrofac responsible for the complete engineering, construction and offshore installation of the platform.