EnBW is laying the first submarine cable of the internal park cabling that connects all 64 wind turbines of the 960MW He Dreiht offshore wind farm.
The company Seaway7 was commissioned with the work. Two installation vessels will lay and wash in a total of around 100 kilometres of cable on the seabed of the North Sea by the summer.
The cables are then pulled into the foundations of the wind turbines and connected. The cable manufacturer JDR had manufactured the 66 kilovolt submarine cables in Great Britain.
The internal park cabling will later be connected to the converter platform of the transmission system operator TenneT, which is expected to be installed at sea in the summer.
There, the electricity produced is bundled, converted from alternating current to direct current and brought ashore with two high-voltage direct current export cables.
He Dreiht is being built about 85 kilometres northwest of Borkum and 110 kilometres west of Heligoland and does not require any subsidies, EnBW said.
The investment volume amounts to around €2.4bn and the project is coordinated by EnBW’s offshore office in Hamburg.
More than 500 people work on this large construction site in the sea at peak times and over 60 ships are involved.
The 64 foundations were already installed last year. From spring of this year, the latest generation of wind turbines from Vestas, each with a capacity of 15MW, will be installed.
EnBW He Dreiht will cover the electricity needs of around 1.1 million households.