EON begins construction of offshore wind farm in Germany

Amrumbank West wind farm in the North Sea received its first foundation Wednesday.
EON has started construction of Amrumbank West wind farm in the North Sea. The first foundation was installed Wednesday, 37km northwest of the island of Helgoland

To help build Amrumbank West and other offshore projects, EON has chartered the MPI Discovery, a self-elevating turbine installation vessel or jackup rig, for several years. The ship is loaded with material in Cuxhaven and proceeds to the deepwater site. It lowers six legs on to the seabed and then raises itself hydraulically above the surface of the sea, creating a stable platform for operating the ram and cranes it uses to install foundations, towers, and turbines. The ram is used to drive the 60m-long steel tubular monopile foundations roughly 304 into the seabed at water depths of up to 24m. The entire foundation structure, which consists of the monopile and the transition piece, weighs about 900 metric tons. E.ON is using a state-of-the-art system to reduce water-borne noise during pile-driving.

Amrumbank West will extend over 32 square kilometers, an area larger than 4,700 soccer fields. Its 80 technologically advanced 3.6MW turbines will give it a total capacity of 288MW, enough to power 300,000 households. Amrumbank West, which will displace more than 740,000 metric tons of carbon emissions annually, is scheduled to be completed and to enter service in the late summer of 2015.
Since 2006, E.ON has invested just under €9 billion in renewables and is currently the world’s third-largest operator of offshore wind farms.