Recent milestones mark significant progress for the East Anglia THREE offshore wind farm, says Niall Armstrong of ScottishPower Renewables.
It’s full steam ahead for ScottishPower Renewables' East Anglia THREE offshore wind farm, which will power the equivalent of more than 1.3 million homes once operational in 2026.
As the electricity transmission execution manager for the project, it’s been a really exciting time of late as we reached a number of milestones on our way to ensuring the safe and successful delivery of East Anglia THREE’s grid assets.
Comprising an offshore converter station, export cables and onshore converter station, the grid works are an essential part of the jigsaw and will transport the green electricity from the wind farm – located 69 km off the coast of East Anglia – to the national grid system onshore.
Together, these assets will form ScottishPower Renewables’ (SPR) first high-voltage direct current (HVDC) offshore wind connection – and it certainly won’t be the last.
As offshore wind farms have increased in size, the need to utilise HVDC links is becoming more common. East Anglia THREE will be the largest wind farm constructed by SPR – and our parent company Iberdrola – across the world.
Speeding towards completion
Construction began at the onshore converter station near Ipswich in August 2022, with fabrication of the offshore converter station commencing in November 2022.
Over a million hours have been worked across the project since – and counting!
We’re delighted to have hit a couple of significant milestones in recent months. In May, we completed the first phase of topside fabrication for the offshore converter station. At this point, the topside was sailed from Romania to Norway for the next phase of electrical equipment installation.
The offshore converter station will weigh over 9,000 tonnes when complete – and is designed to operate automatically without any people based there. All going well, it will be ready for transportation to the wind farm location next year.
At the onshore site, we are nearing the end of the civil works, which allowed us to transport the four converter transformers, built in Germany, from Ipswich Port to the converter site. These transformers are so large that we needed specialist, slow-moving transport vehicles.
We’re getting close to having all of the electrical equipment manufactured and tested and, for the rest of this year, we will be transporting this to the onshore and offshore converter stations. In parallel, we’re manufacturing the export cable for both the onshore and offshore cable corridors.
A strong supply chain
Whether onshore or offshore, there are many other companies and service providers who are providing essential support to make this project successful – from specialist transport companies and equipment suppliers to survey and engineering companies, ports and archaeologists.
It’s amazing to see all the careful planning coming together to achieve the largest project SPR has ever delivered.
It is a massive source of pride to be part of a project like this, working alongside excellent people within SPR and across the supply chain who are putting in a huge amount of effort to deliver a cleaner, greener and better future for us all.
For more information, visit spreastanglia.com
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