Jan De Nul hired to connect Denmark’s largest wind farm

‘Thor’ will be Denmark’s largest offshore wind farm, owned and operated by RWE, for a total cost of €2 billion (DKK15.5 billion) to put in. The timescale for grid connection is by the end of 2027, for 30 years.

The cables, which will be designed and manufactured by Hellenic Cables, will consist of two 275kV HVAC export cables, each with an onshore length of 13km and an offshore length of 30km. 

There will also be 200km of 66kV inter-array cables to connect all 72 wind turbines. Jan De Nul will carry out all of the transport, laying and burial work. 

With a planned capacity of more than 1,000 megawatts, Thor will be built in the Danish North Sea, approximately 22 kilometres from Thorsminde on the west coast of Jutland.

The cable laying award comes a couple of months after the Danish government announced it was pausing its ‘open door’ procedure on wind farms, which allowed wind farm developers to apply to develop offshore farms on their own initiative. It meant they could be flexible about choosing project location, generation capacity and grid connection arrangements

REPowerEU, the EU’s energy policy, has doubled down on the expansion of offshore wind. At two major summits in 2022, EU heads of government and the EU Commission president committed to ambitious targets for offshore in the North Sea and Baltic Sea: 76GW and 20GW by 2030 respectively. As a frontrunner in offshore wind, Denmark committed to 13GW by 2030, up from 2.3GW today.