Germany: Construction of Trianel's Borkum Offshore Wind Farm Reaches Next Stage

The installation work for the internal transformer platform for Trianel's Borkum wind farm was successfully completed yesterday.

During a two-day mission at the construction site, 45 kilometers off the Borkum's coast, the heavy lift vessel Oleg Strashnov lifted the 2,400-ton deck onto the substructure (jacket).  Then the transformer platform and jacket were welded together.

"With the transformer platform, we haven't just installed the power outlet for the wind farm, but we also created the conditions for the next stage of construction," said Klaus Horstick, Managing Director of Trianel wind farm Borkum GmbH & Co. KG. "In the coming months, we will erect the wind turbines."

The erection of the AREVA M5000 turbines with a capacity of 5 MW should start in May. During the installation of wind turbines, the installation vessel MPI Adventure will be used for half a year.

The offshore wind farm is planned to be connected to the grid by TenneT in the 3rd quarter of 2013. Originally, the commissioning was planned for 2012/2013 year. However, a new completion date is scheduled for the 4th quarter of 2013.

This is one of the several German offshore wind projects that have been bank-financed to be under construction now - in fact, this was the first one to have been financed (I worked on it when I was still in my previous job, but was not involved in the final stages of the financing in 2010). As a few other projects in Germany, it's been hit by the delays in building the grid connections but is now moving to the final construction stage. (Bank financings include contingency planning that allows project construction to survive serious delays (typically in the 6-12 months range); I can't comment on any project specifics, but the generalised delays on grid connections have meant that these projects have had less room for manoeuver than usual for other problems. The lesson banks are taking from these projects is not that you can't do project finance for offshore, but that you need to increase the contingency budget a bit more. That will have a cost but at least it not prevent financing)

Wind power