UK: Final turbine installed at KFE

Considering the amount of variables involved working offshore, this is a real achievement and as a result of a proper team effort. We now say goodbye to “Neptune”, the jack up vessel  who has served us well throughout the whole installation process.

Although a relatively small offshore project, we have to work within a small window and do not have the luxury of picking up the lost time later as is the case on larger projects. Communication, organisation and co-ordination has to be tight and robust health and safety policy crucial to avoid unnecessary delays.  Bringing this part of the project in on time is a real testiment to the high level of efficiency across the whole project – important also to remember that this project has spanned four years – from pre-consent through to construction!

So, what else is happening?

Although the heavy installation work is complete, we are now moving into the busy commissining phase where many concurrent tasks have to take place to ensure the safe and efficient energisation and commissioning of the wind farm.

Although a large amount of this work will take place from the turbines, there is also a lot happening at the sub station in Herne Bay.

Switchgear:

The switchgear power cable terminations have been made ready to be connected to the UKPN network which is scheduled to take place on 18th August. This means that all the high voltage equipment in the wind farm will be considered to be live from this point forward and we will employ Vattenfall’s set of safety rules to ensure that all work on or near the high voltage system is carried out safely.

Data collection:

Installation and testing and commissioning work continues on our newly installed SCADA system (Supervisory Control and Data Acqusition).   This system is an important part of controlling and monitoring  the wind farm and when operational, it will  allow us to see what is going on – from fault finding and control to data collection.  To make this possible, we install fibre optic cables to each turbine.   Final jointing (termination) of these cables is almost complete.

We expect to be generating electricity by the end of September.