NRG will start six drillings under the dunes this week as part of TenneT’s project to bring wind energy from the sea to land on the Maasvlakte in the Netherlands.
Three more will follow after the summer. The special drilling job can be followed live from the information point on the Noordzeeboulevard.
In recent days, contractor NRG (Denys, Alsema and Van Vulpen) has made the necessary preparations both inside the dike and on the beach.
The electric drill is making a horizontally directional drilling over a distance of approximately 200 metres towards the beach.
An empty plastic casing will be placed in that borehole, into which the electricity cable will later be pulled.
NRG previously did this at Heemskerk/Wijk aan Zee and Velsen for the landing of ‘wind at sea’.
Robert Wijnholds, on behalf of TenneT, said: “This time it concerns drilling for the grid connections of the IJmuiden Ver Beta and Gamma wind energy areas.
“The cables will later be installed in the seabed by the Swedish manufacturer and contractor NKT, up to the location where the transformer platform at sea will soon be built.”
In order to connect such an unmanned platform at sea to the high-voltage grid on land, a 525,000 volt cable system is buried in the seabed.
Wijnholds added: “This bundle consists of four separate cables: a negative and a positive pole, a ‘metallic return’ and a fibre optic cable.
“The metallic return ensures that the system can continue to use half of its capacity in the event of a cable failure. All systems at sea will soon be remotely controlled via the fibre optic cable.”
NRG carries out the horizontal (via GPS) directional drilling in three steps.
Wijnholds said: “First, they use the electric drill to make a so-called pilot drilling from the work area behind the dunes to the beach.
“The drilling team then pulls a reamer through the drilling to make the hole bigger.
“During the third and final step, the reamer is connected to a casing pipe with a diameter of almost half a metre and then pulled back.
“They are now doing this a total of six times.”
The sea cables will be installed next year and will be laid metres deep in the beach.
Behind the dunes, they will be connected underground to the electricity cables that are currently being laid in the ground on land.