SeaMade wins offshore wind deal award

Financial close for the project was reached in just two and a half months. The project, a partnership between Otary, ENGIE Electrabel and Eneco Wind Belgium, is financed by an international lending consortium consisting of the European Investment Bank (providing a commitment via the European Fund for Strategic Investments), the Danish export credit agency EKF and 15 commercial banks, including Belgian, Dutch, French, German, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish banks.

“We are pleased to have won the prestigious IJGlobal award of European Offshore Wind deal of the year,” said Mathias Verkest, CEO of SeaMade, which is a combination of two offshore wind projects in Belgium, previously known as Mermaid (235MW) and Seastar (252MW).

Work in progress

Located 40-50km off the coast from Ostend, the wind farm will be operated and serviced from the Otary logistical hub in the Port of Ostend. Construction of the project has already been initiated with ongoing geophys activities and manufacturing of structural assets.

Offshore construction works are scheduled to start in summer 2019 with the project operational before the end of 2020.

The 58 offshore wind turbines will be installed and maintained by Siemens Gamesa, using DEME’s installation vessel ‘Apollo’ in Q3/Q4 2020. Meanwhile, production of the transition pieces at SIF (Roermond, NL) has started, as has production of the offshore substation decks at the Smulders yard in Hoboken (BE).

The monopile foundations are scheduled to be installed as from August 2019 onwards using the ‘Innovation’ installation vessel. The offshore substations and export cables will be installed in Q1/Q2 2020 by respectively the heavy lifting vessel ‘Gulliver’ (topsides), ‘Innovation’ (topside foundations) and ‘Livingstone’ (export cable).

By Rebecca Jeffrey