Offshore wind park

03-11-2008:

Novenco’s Offshore division has secured the order to supply air handling units to the world’s largest offshore wind park, supplying the German electricity grid.

Most remote wind park in the world
Novenco’s client ABB will connect a 400-megawatt wind park to the German grid, via a HVDC (high-voltage direct current) cable, located more than 100 kilometers off the German coast in the North Sea. This will be the most remote wind park in the world.

Scheduled to be operational in September 2009, the wind park is expected to avoid CO2 emissions of 1.5 million tons per year by replacing fossil-fuel generation. Germany currently uses wind for about 7 percent of its electricity requirements and expects to double the share of wind energy by 2020.

ABB is responsible for system engineering including design, supply and installation of the offshore converter, sea and land cable systems and the onshore converter.
Novenco will supply 4 ZCP-135 and 6 ZCR air handling units as well as inlet louvres and dampers.

The air handling units will be used to cool the large transformers installed on a separate platform which will convert the AC power generated by the windmills to DC before sending it to land.

First offshore wind farms
Up to now wind farms have mainly been located onshore, but suitable sites are becoming scarce in many European countries and major efforts today are directed to develop future wind farms offshore.

In Denmark, UK and a few other countries the first offshore wind farms are already installed and because of the size of the coming offshore wind farms it will be necessary to connect them to the high voltage level of the transmission system (in Europe normally at the 400 kV level).

A considerable part of the planned offshore wind farms will be located far away from shore and connecting them to the grid at the nearest possible point normally adds some more kilometers onshore to the distance of the wind farm to shore.

Adequate reliability
Repair of offshore equipment is expensive and reduces the availability of the wind farm, so it is important to design for adequate reliability.

Thus the following aspects have been considered in the design of our equipment:

Use of components with a low failure rate
Redundancy to continue operation even at single component level failure
Provision for a short meantime to repair
The air handling units will be built in stainless steel and the cooling coils will be titanium.

Fans will be direct driven and all instrumentation from differential pressure transmitters to flow switches will be doubled up to give 100% redundancy.

Click here to read more about our Offshore department.