Wind farm cable construction complete

LS Cable & System, a consortium partner of Jan De Nul Group, produced the cables. Jan De Nul’s cable laying vessel Isaac Newton will load the 220 kV AC cables from LS Cable’s factory in Donghae, South Korea, and transport them to the project for installation in April 2022.

Jeroen Devos, project manager at Jan De Nul Group, said: “The successful delivery of the first 90 km of cables is the first major milestone for our project. We look forward to installing these cables in Q2 2022 by means of our custom-built tracked vertical injector Moonfish and our offshore installation vessels Isaac Newton and Adhémar de Saint-Venant.”

This first lot consists of the complete cables for Hollandse Kust (noord) (HKn) and the nearshore section for the Hollandse Kust (west Alpha) (HKwA). In total, this is more than 90km of cables, weighing 7,160t and having very large cross sections resulting in an overall cable diameter of more than 25cm.

Installation process

Isaac Newton will install the cables on the seabed. In the nearshore area, the in-house developed tracked vertical injector Moonfish will bury the cables up to 8 m below the seabed level. The burial offshore is taken care of by the trencher UTV1200, supported by the multipurpose vessel Adhémar de Saint-Venant. Jan De Nul will also install multiple cable protection systems and rock berms at the cable crossings along the route.

Jan De Nul Group and LS Cable & System are jointly responsible for the design, supply, installation, protection and testing of the 210 km of submarine power cables for HKn and HKwA of TenneT.

Delivery of the HKn project is foreseen by the end of 2022. The HKwA project is planned to be finished by the end of 2023. Both windfarms have an installed capacity of 700MW.