Acta Centaurus (pictured) is currently making a stop in the Port of Hamburg before starting work for Vattenfall’s Dan Tysk and Sandbank offshore wind farms 70km off Sylt, Germany, in the next eight months.
The SOV is owned by the Dutch shipping company Acta Marine.
Acta Centaurus will first make its way to the Danish port of Esbjerg.
Here containers with the technical equipment, tools and spare parts for the turbines are loaded and the service technicians go on board.
At the beginning of March, the SOV will start its work on the two sites.
First, Acta Centaurus will work for four months at the Sandbank offshore wind farm and then carry out maintenance work at DanTysk for another four months.
The entire service campaign is expected to last until October of this year.
At peak times during the coming months, up to 100 people will work in shifts to maintain the wind farms.
Every 14 days, Acta Centaurus will regularly call at Esbjerg to load new equipment and change service teams.
The Acta Centaurus, which is more than 90 metres long, has a gangway designed to compensate for the wave movements of the North Sea in all directions.
This means that a safe passage of people from the ship to the turbines is guaranteed even at wave heights of more than three metres, Vattenfall said.
The loading crane for heavy goods also has this compensation mechanism. The ship can accommodate up to 120 people.
Vattenfall’s head of offshore operations Germany Michael Lorenzen said: “Maintenance work on an offshore wind farm is a much greater challenge for people and technology than comparable work on land.
“The harsh North Sea weather plays a decisive role in this, especially with regard to occupational safety and the working hours of the service teams.
“Suitable service logistics significantly improve the predictability of such operations and have an overall positive effect on the availability and thus the economic viability of fossil-free technologies such as offshore wind.”