Nexans has formed a consortium with Tesmec’s subsidiary Marais Laying Technologies Australia to offer a complete collector cable service for Stockyard Hill wind farm in Australia.
Image: Nexans, Marais Laying to lay cable infrastructure for Stockyard Hill Wind Farm. Photo: Courtesy of Nexans.
The consortium of Nexans and Marais Laying was selected by Goldwind Australia’s Stockyard Hill project’s Balance of Plant contractor SNC-Lavalin and WHBO joint venture.
The Stockyard Hill wind farm is expected to generate electricity from its 149 turbines, which will be enough to power 390,000 homes while offsetting nearly two million tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
The wind farm will be located 35km west of Ballarat in Victoria’s central highlands and is expected to create nearly 300 jobs during the peak construction time and up to 25 permanent jobs, once the wind farm is complete.
The €12m (A$20m) contract includes the design, manufacture, supply, installation and testing of cable network. Out of the contract amount, €5.2m (A$9.1m) will be attributed to Nexans.
To the consortium, Marais Laying will add its expertise of automated trenching and laying of long length of single-core cable. The Marais SMC 200 R Trencher will be used to cut nearly 130km of narrow trench while simultaneously laying the cables and backfilling.
For this contract, Nexans will provide its range of WINDLINK solutions including a variety of 33 kV power cables manufactured at its Chinese facility, with aluminium conductor cross-sections ranging from 95mm2 to 1,000mm2.
Nexans will install a total of 275km of 33kV Nexans WINDLINK cables in trenches to collect electricity generated by the wind turbines and will feed it into three 33/132 kV substations that will connect the wind farm to the local grid.
Nexans industry & solutions business group strategic marketing director Veronique Stappers said: “The Stockyard Hill Wind Farm is a perfect example of Nexans’ commitment to creating value for our customers by driving CAPEX and OPEX savings across their renewable energy projects.
“We are honoured to join our forces with Tesmec in order to contribute to making wind and solar farm projects more competitive while driving the enhanced performance of the assets.”