BARDOT Group joins Hywind, the Floating Offshore WInd Project

French company BARDOT Group has been awarded by Nexans the supply of buoyancy modules for the power cables of world’s first floating wind farm, Hywind in Scotland.

The 30 MW floating farm, located 30km off the coast of Peterhead, will be operated by Norwegian Oil and Gas company Statoil. The project is expected to provide electricity to 20,000 homes, and is leading the way to future wind farm developments. Hywind will consist of five wind turbine generators connected through a cable network. The energy produced by the turbines will then be carried back to land by a single export cable. The cabling has been awarded to Nexans, who has chosen BARDOT Group to equip its dynamic cables with buoyancy modules.

The contract between Nexans and BARDOT Group consists in the procurement of several hundreds of buoyancy modules, each providing around 400kg of buoyancy and rated for 120m of water depth. The buoyancy modules integrate BARDOT’s in-house DeepFloat® syntactic foam technology, and will provide flotation assistance in the dynamic sections of the power cables. This dynamic section is of highly critical technical requirements, as submitted to rough and heavy movements of waves, currents and tides. The buoyancy modules are to be delivered onsite in May 2017.

BARDOT’s experience and know-how in subsea engineering will be key assets to the project’s success and the development of offshore wind energy.