Vroon Offshore Services will offer logistics support, accommodation and walk-to-work services for MHI Vestas Offshore Wind during construction of the 660MW Walney Extension offshore wind farm in the Irish Sea.
Construction of ’the wind farm, which is owned by Dong Energy, is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2017 with planned completion in 2018.
MHI Vestas will supply forty V164-8.0 MW turbines to the first phase of the project.
For executing the project, Vroon will deploy its new building subsea-support vessel VOS Start.
The company said the vessel has been specifically designed to provide accommodating and personnel-transfer requirements of the offshore industry.
Vroon claims that the vessel can provide hotel-standard accommodation and work space for up to 60 client personnel and is equipped with motion-compensating gangway.
Located 19km from the coast, the wind farm will be spread across in an area of 149km2. Depth of the grounded monopole foundations will range between 21m to 37m.
Apart from MHI Vestas, Siemens will supply 47 of SWT-7.0- 154 turbines for the project. The accumulated power producing capacity of the wind farm is 659MW.
When fully commissioned, the wind farm can generate enough power to light 600,000 British households.
The wind farm can eliminate an estimated amount of 943,000 tonnes of CO2 and 21,000 tonnes of SO2 from the atmosphere. It has an expected life of about 25 years.
Image: Vroon to provide support services to MHI Vestas with its VOS Start vessel. Photo: Courtesy of Vroon Offshore Services.