RWE has advanced the development of Sofia Offshore Wind Farm. The company has selected Van Oord as the preferred supplier for the engineering, procurement, construction and installation (EPCI) of the monopile foundations and array cables.The 1.4GW Sofia is sited on Dogger Bank in the central North Sea 195 kilometres from the North East coast, where Van Oord, through its UK-branch MPI Offshore, will create a logistics hub to deliver the scope of work. Van Oord will deploy its offshore installation vessel Aeolus to install the 100 extended monopile foundations without transition pieces, while the 350 kilometres of array cables will be installed by the firm’s cable-laying vessel Nexus. The company will sub-contract the fabrication of the foundations and array cables. Onshore construction will get underway at Sofia’s converter station site in Teesside early next year. Work on the foundation and array package is set to begin after the project’s financial investment decision in Q1 2021, with installation scheduled for 2024.
