COWI has been selected by Statkraft as Owner’s Engineer for the North Irish Sea Array (NISA) offshore wind farm .
The company will support Statkraft in preparing an auction application for the first offshore competition under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme (ORESS-1) in Ireland.
COWI’s scope of work will include foundation concept design, electrical design, construction, operations and maintenance (O&M) port assessment, and cost model development.
“Working against challenges in the marketplace, such as rising materials costs and pressures to increase renewable energy capacity, keeping the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) at the forefront of the application will be central to all work on the project”, said COWI.
COWI and Statkraft are planning to submit a bid by the end of 2022, ahead of the auction which is due to take place in the first half of 2023.
The North Irish Sea Array project site covers around 226.9 square kilometres in the Irish Sea between seven and 17 kilometres off the coast of the Dublin, Meath, and Louth counties.
The NISA offshore wind farm is one of the seven projects the Irish Government invited to apply for Maritime Area Consent (MAC) in March 2022.
If approved, NISA could play an important role in helping Ireland meet its ambitions of reaching 80 per cent of renewable energy by 2030. Once fully operational, the project will have the capacity to power over 500,000 homes with clean energy, the developer said.