| Project Detail |
Client: TenneT
Location: 130 km off the coast of Germany (construction took place in the UAE)
Scope: Engineering, procurement, construction and offshore installation of the BorWin3 platform
Petrofac, in consortium with Siemens was awarded a contract by TenneT, the German-Dutch transmission grid operator, for the BorWin3 offshore wind farm grid connection. Petrofac is responsible for the construction and offshore installation of the BorWin Gamma platform, which will house a Siemens high voltage direct current (HVDC) station that converts the alternating current produced by the wind turbines to direct current before transmitting it onshore to the German national grid.
It’s one of the largest offshore project platforms constructed in the UAE – and it’s also a giant demonstration of Petrofac’s diversification from oil and gas into renewable energy.
The platforms jacket was successfully installed in the North Sea, nearly 130 kilometres off the German coast, in May 2018, and the fabrication and construction of the topside was completed in August 2018.
The final stages of the project in Drydocks World saw the mega jacking and load-out of the topside, completing one of the heaviest and biggest jacking lifts in the Middle East.
The offshore converter platform sailed from Dubai to the North Sea. Through the Gulf of Oman, the 18,000 ton topside passed into the Red Sea before going through the Suez Canal onto the Mediterranean and past Gibraltar. The journey then moved through the Bay of Biscay, to the English Channel and into the North Sea, where the BorWin gamma topside was installed on its jacket foundation.
When operational, the platform will house a Siemens 900 megawatt HVDC station that will convert the alternating current produced by the wind turbines to direct current before transmitting it onshore to the German national grid, from where it will supply more than one million German households with clean electricity from wind power. It will be one of the world’s heaviest and largest HVDC platforms, with the topside six storeys high, weighing in at 20,000 tonnes and about the size of half a football pitch.
BorWin3 construction facts
Construction of the BorWin3 platform took place in Drydocks World, Dubai, which extends across an impressive 10 square kms
The topside took over 13.5 million man-hours to construct and used 10,500 tonnes of steel – more than the Eiffel Tower
Nearly five square kms – half of the Drydocks area – was taken up by the project
Such is the scale of the site that many of the staff used bicycles to get around
At peak, more than 1,500 workers were engaged in the construction of the platform |
