The 731.5 MW Borssele 3 and 4 offshore wind farm is now fully operational, Blauwwind, the consortium behind the project in the Dutch North Sea, announced during an online Handover to Operations ceremony.
The construction of the wind farm, comprising a total of 77 Vestas V164-9.5 MW turbines, was completed on-time, with official commissioning on 6 January 2021, Blauwwind said.
”This is a great achievement of everybody involved,” said Roeland Borsboom , project director and CEO for Blauwwind.
”In difficult circumstances, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were still able to construct the windfarm at a swift pace, without noteworthy problems or incidents. The five partners, the project organisation and the (sub)contractors collaborated incredibly well, while I also would like to mention the smooth cooperation with both TenneT, the owner of the offshore substation Borssele Beta, and Østed, our neighbours of the Borssele I&II project. Today we proudly celebrate the hand-over of the project to the Blauwwind operations team.”
The Blauwwind consortium, currently consisting of Partners Group (45%), Shell (20%), Diamond Generating Europe (15%), Van Oord (10%), and Eneco (10%), won the tender by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs in December 2016.
Financial Close and project sanction was achieved in June 2018, and the first monopile was installed in October 2019.
The first of the project’s 77 MHI Vestas 9.5 MW turbines was installed at the site some 22 kilometres off Zeeland at the end of May 2020, and the first power was produced in August. By the end of November 2020, all the wind turbines were in place.
The wind farm is expected to produce roughly 3,000 GWh of electricity per year, which is equivalent to the annual power use of 825,000 Dutch households.
Shell Energy Europe Limited and Eneco have secured contracts to each sell 50 per cent of the power produced. Operations and Maintenance of the wind farm will be done from a permanently manned service operations vessel which has her home base in Oostende, Belgium.