At Cleveleys near Blackpool, the Stemat Spirit cable barge arrived just off shore in the afternoon of Saturday 7 May. It beached in the early hours of Sunday 8 May in the morning, waiting for very low tide. At about 9 a.m., the process of pulling the cable from the spool on board the barge began.
Up till now, Stemat Spirit has managed to lay 7 kilometres of the 29-kilometre long submarine cable, running half the 44-kilometre long distance from the offshore substation in Walney 2 to the onshore substation at Cleveleys. The first section of the export cable will be laid from the shore of Cleveleys and onwards the site.
The second section of the export cable will be laid by the installation vessel Giulio Verne, starting from the offshore substation and onwards the shore. Where the two cables meet, they will be taken out of the water and connected and thereafter lowered to the seabed and buried.
As for the Walney 1, the export cable is a single-wire armoured three-core 132kV cable complete with a 48-core fibre optic cable. The cable will be laid approximately 2 metres below the seabed during the cable installation process.
At Cleveleys, 5 kilometres off the coastline, some 35 workers are working hard to finish the offshore substation before August and well in time to receive the first power from Walney 2. The civil works are almost completed, and the technical installations in the onshore substation have begun.
About the Walney offshore windfarm:
The Walney Offshore Windfarm project is located approximately 15km west of Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. The project consists of Walney 1 and Walney 2 each with 51 – 3.6MW turbines, giving a total capacity of the Walney project of 367.2MW. The rotor diameter of the turbines is 107m for Walney 1 and 120m for Walney 2, with a maximum height of 150m from blade tip to sea level. The total area of the development is some 73km2.
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Source: dongenergy, May 19, 2011