TenneT has awarded a contract for construction of land and sea converter stations as part of the BorWin6 offshore transmission system to a consortium of McDermott and Global Energy Interconnection Research Institute (GEIRI) & C-EPRI Electric Power Engineering (C-EPRI).
McDermott will focus on construction of the converter stations for the 235km high voltage direct current (HVDC) system, which will connect offshore wind farms in the North Sea to Schleswig-Holstein in Germany.
GEIRI & C-EPRI will in turn focus on electrical engineering of the 980MW transmission capacity project.
TenneT said that a second lot, for the production and laying of cables, will follow in summer 2022 and be awarded by year-end.
Construction of the topside, which is being built in Qingdao in China, is expected to start in mid-2023 and construction of the jackets in Batam, Indonesia, is due to start at the end of next year.
Construction of the land station is due begin in 2024, while the jackets are scheduled to be placed in the 38-metre deep water around mid-2026.
Tim Meyerjürgens, COO of TenneT, said: “With regard to the high expansion targets for offshore wind energy in the North Sea, we are pleased that an international consortium was able to prevail in our tendering procedure. Even though this consortium is new to us, it has a lot of experience in the offshore as well as the HVDC business.
“As a transmission system operator, we will need many reliable partners in the coming years to enable the offshore expansion at the desired pace and with the targeted connection capacities. In terms of speeding up the process, we have taken the lead with this project: It was initially planned with a connection capacity of 930 megawatts.
“In the technical planning, we were able to increase the capacity by 50 megawatts. The project was recently confirmed in the latest grid development plan.”