He Dreiht is being built roughly 85 kilometres northwest of Borkum and about 110 kilometres west of Helgoland. More than 500 employees will work on this large construction site in the middle of the sea at peak times. Over 60 ships are involved in the construction of the wind farm. EnBW’s offshore office in Hamburg is coordinating the project.The Thialf will install the first foundations in the seabed in the next few days. A monopile – a 70-metre-long steel foundation 9.2 metres in diameter and weighing around 1,350 metric tonnes – will be used, upon which a transition piece will be placed. The monopiles and transition pieces had previously been loaded onto floating platforms in Eemshaven in the Netherlands and towed to the construction site by tugboats. Work on installing all of the foundations will continue into the summer. The wind turbines and cables are being manufactured at the same time and will be installed and laid in early 2025.
The entire wind farm is scheduled to go into operation at the end of 2025. EnBW will be responsible for the technical and commercial management. Servicing and maintenance work will be carried out from its service base in Emden.
The Dutch-German grid operator TenneT will connect the wind farm to the grid using an offshore converter station and two high-voltage DC export cables. The cables will be laid over a distance of 120 kilometres underwater and 110 kilometres on land. From the landfall point near Hilgenriedesiel, the electricity will be transmitted by buried cable to the future Garrel/Ost converter station in the Cloppenburg area.
A partner consortium made up of Allianz Capital Partners, AIP, and Norges Bank Investment Management owns 49.9% of the shares in He Dreiht.
Image: courtesy EnBW/Weltenangler
