The world's largest offshore wind farm, London Array, has officially been inaugurated off the British coast.
London Array is a joint project of E.ON, the Danish energy company Dong and Masdar, the infrastructure fund of the Kingdom of Abu Dhabi. Present were Prime Minister David Cameron, Johannes Teyssen, (E.ON), Brent Cheshire, (Dong Energy), Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber (Masdar) and Peter Löscher (Siemens).
London Array
London Array is located 20 km off the Kent coast in south-east England. The wind farm has been operational since April, and at a capacity of 630 MW will produce enough clean energy every year to meet the demand of about half a million UK homes.
Offshore Wind Farm Construction
Offshore construction began in March 2011 with the first foundations and the two offshore transformer stations. Since then 175 Siemens wind turbines have been erected and over 200 km of cabling has been laid at a water depth of 25 m. Each wind turbine reaches a height of 147 m above sea level. And each of the two offshore transformer stations, which bundle the electricity generated by the wind farm and feed it to the power grid on the mainland, weighs 1250 t.
MPI Discovery and Adventure
When the construction work was in full swing, over sixty vessels and more than 1000 people were at the site at the same time. The largest vessels included the MPI Discovery and its sister ship, the MPI Adventure. On average, the specialists aboard the MPI Discovery needed one to two days to fully erect a wind turbine out at sea; if the weather was fine, this only took twelve hours.
Under a six-year contract E.ON is also using the MPI Discovery to build the next offshore wind farms: Kårehamn (Sweden), Humber Gateway (UK) and Amrumbank-West in Germany's North Sea.
Picture: One of E.ON's other wind farms in the UK, Scroby Sands (by E.ON UK)
