As the Dutch offshore wind market is developing, domestic ports and terminals are preparing to take advantage of the booming industry.
One such terminal is Holland Cargo Terminal (HCT), currently involved in one of the ongoing offshore wind projects in the Netherlands.
The terminal serves as an assembly site for the components of wind turbines being installed at the Westermeerwind project.
“The foundations are brought directly from Roermond to the installation location, while everything on top of the foundation is brought here,” Michael van Toledo, General Manager at HCT , told Offshore WIND.
Although HCT does not assemble the components itself, it does assist the developer in that process, van Toledo explained, and added: “We also provide office space. Siemens is currently occupying a complete floor in our building.”
HCT was originally designed to operate solely as a container terminal, ”however, that had shown to be unsuccessful,” van Toledo said.
“Therefore, with the strategy change, together with the port of Amsterdam, we have decided to develop the terminal into a multipurpose hub, where we focus on four segments: containers, breakbulk, roll on roll off, and project cargo largely focused on offshore wind,” he said.
Around 800 wind turbines are planned to be installed in the North Sea in the near future, van Toledo pointed out.
When asked how the locks at the port of Amsterdam are affecting these operations, he said: “With the coming of the new lock we do not see any hindrance. There will be no complete wind turbines going through the port, only parts which are going to get bigger and bigger.“
“And of course, our goal is to have parts assembled at our place to make a wind turbine as complete as possible in order to move it to the final location.”
Van Toledo underlined that HCT’s aim is to explain to the industry that they can provide the necessary capacity by reaching out to heavy-lift and engineering companies involved in the offshore wind industry.
”And obviously, we expect projects like Westermerwind will make our presence known within the market,” he concluded.