Ailes Marines, a subsidiary of Iberdrola, has announced that the construction works on the 496 MW Saint-Brieuc offshore wind farm are now resuming, saying the installation vessel Aeolus will be continuing pile and drilling installation operations on the remaining wind turbine positions.
According to the AIS data, Van Oord’s jack-up vessel is en route to the Saint-Brieuc offshore wind farm site in the Bay of Saint-Brieuc in Brittany, 16.3 kilometres from the Breton coast.
Once it arrives at the location, the vessel will resume pile installation operations on the remaining 22 wind turbine positions out of a total of 62.
In addition, installation operations will resume in the coming months on the 38 jacket foundations that are yet to be placed on the seabed.
The installation of the jackets started on 1 July, while the first four units were placed on the seabed a few weeks later.
These two campaigns will take place over several months, depending on the weather conditions.
First Wind Turbines to Be Installed This Year
The 496 MW offshore wind farm will comprise 62 Siemens Gamesa 8 MW wind turbines and will be the first offshore wind project in France to have them installed on jacket foundations.
The installation of the wind turbines will be carried out by Fred. Olsen Windcarrier’s Brave Tern vessel.
The first 8 MW units will be placed on their jacket foundations in mid-2023.
The towers are being delivered by Haizea Breizh, the French subsidiary of the Spanish company Haizea Wind Group.
Haizea is manufacturing and painting the towers at its factory in the Port of Bilbao, Spain, and then shipping them to the workshop in the Port of Brest, where the assembly of the internal components such as platform, cables, and ladders is performed by SPIE Industrie & Tertiaire.
From Brest, the towers will be delivered to Siemens Gamesa’s factory in Le Havre. For each rotation from Le Havre to the Saint-Brieuc wind farm site, Brave Tern will ship four towers, four nacelles, and twelve blades, the developer said.
Depending on the weather conditions, the units will be commissioned progressively from the second half of the year.
Cable Installation Work Continues
The campaign to install the inter-array cables began in January. Prysmian, the company in charge of supplying the inter-array cables, is continuing the work of laying 90 kilometres of inter-array cables.
Currently, three vessels are mobilised for these operations: the trenching support vessel Aethra , the DP3 cable-laying vessel Ariadne , and the walk-to-work vessel Island Diligence .
The operations will be controlled from Ailes Marines’ technical base located in Kerantour and in the port of Lézardrieux. According to the developer, they will mobilise up to thirty ships for several months.
Saint-Brieuc, developed by Iberdrola’s wholly-owned subsidiary Ailes Marines, is the first large-scale offshore wind farm in Brittany to obtain all the necessary government permits for its construction and operation.
Once completed, the offshore wind farm is expected to generate enough clean energy for 835,000 people.