Kaskasi is RWE’s sixth wind farm off the German coast, the 342MW project is being built 35 kilometres north of the island of Helgoland and recently completed the installation of the substation topside on the foundation.The journey of the 1,400 tonne substation topside started in Danish Aalborg at the manufacturing facility of Bladt Industries and took two days to ship across the North Sea. Gulliver, a Floating Heavy Lift Vessel of SCALDIS, placed the substation onto the monopile foundation.
In parallel, foundation installation works are underway: With Seaway 7’s Strashnov, DEME’s Neptune and Sea Challenger and Fred Olsen’s Blue Tern, four vessels are engaged in the installation of a total of 38 monopile foundations for the wind turbines and their transition pieces. The foundations, each up to 64 metres long, weigh up to 740 tonnes.
At the Kaskasi offshore wind farm, three new technologies will be tested. RWE plan to install special collars around three monopile foundations (Collared Monopile). A further innovation is the introduction of foundations which were installed using vibro pile driving and are enclosed in a concrete ring that expands in the seabed (Self-Expanding Pile Shoe). The third project is that Siemens Gamesa and RWE will equip a number of wind turbines with recyclable rotor blades.
Installation of the wind turbines is scheduled to start this summer. By the end of 2022, a total of 38 wind turbines are to be fully operational.
