The substation topside has been installed on the 450 MW Calvados offshore wind project in France, also known as the Courseulles-sur-Mer offshore wind farm.
The operation was carried out by DEME’s installation vessel Gulliver more than ten kilometres off the coast of Nacre and Bessin.
The substation topside was designed and manufactured by Atlantique Offshore Energy, a business unit of Chantiers de l’Atlantique focused on electrical offshore substations. Weighing 2,100 tonnes, 41 metres long, 29 metres wide, and 17 metres high, the unit will centralise the electricity produced by the wind turbines to send it ashore to the electrical substation located in Ranville.
Last year, the offshore substation for the 500 MW Fécamp wind farm off France was delivered and installed at the project site, after the substation for the 480 MW Saint-Nazaire project was installed in 2021 (this was the first offshore wind substation installed in the country).
Atlantique Offshore Energy and its partners secured the contracts to deliver electrical substations for the Fécamp and Courseulles-sur-Mer offshore wind farms in 2020.
The following year, the French company also signed a five-year preventive maintenance contract for the offshore substation being built for the Calvados offshore wind farm. This contract followed the same agreements signed for the offshore substations for the Saint-Nazaire and Fécamp wind farms.
The Calvados offshore wind farm will comprise 64 Siemens Gamesa 7 MW wind turbines, ten of which will feature the RecyclableBlades.
Once fully commissioned in 2024, the project will generate the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of 630,000 people or over 90 per cent of the Calvados French department’s population.