Strainstall, a unit of James Fisher and Sons, has received a contract from marine engineers MacGregor to provide crucial mooring monitoring for the Statoil’s Hywind floating offshore wind farm off the coast of Peterhead, Scotland.
Being developed by Statoil, the Hywind project is said to be world’s first floating offshore wind farm off the east coast of Scotland.
For the project, MacGregor will provide an integrated offshore mooring solution for the floating turbines.
The project is intended to demonstrate the feasibility of future commercial floating offshore wind farms in deepwater sites with optimal wind conditions.
Featuring five floating turbines, each with 6MW capacity, the project is expected to generate electricity required to power around 20,000 households in Aberdeenshire.
Statoil plans to commission the first turbine in late 2017.
Under the contract, Strainstall will integrate its strain ring monitoring sensors to MacGregor’s chain stoppers, which anchor each floating turbine to the seabed.
The sensors are designed to provide highly accurate mooring load information.
Strainstall managing director Simon Everett said: “We have worked with MacGregor for many years providing our unique strain ring product for their pusnes chain stopper mooring applications in the oil and gas industry and we are delighted to work with them to bring our combined technologies into the renewables sector for this world first project.”
“Strainstall has considerable experience of providing mooring monitoring solutions and we see an exciting opportunity to bring this knowledge to the floating renewables market as it develops over the coming years.”
Strainstall said the system will be capable of sensing tiny changes in tension, allowing operators to better understand the load and fatigue life of the floating structures.
Image: Illustration of Hywind floating wind farm. Photo: courtesy of Flickr/Statoil.