Offshore vessel owner Olympic Shipping and gangway provider Safeway are cooperating on the Sandbank wind farm project off Germany, under a contract by subsea power cable provider JDR Cables.
Olympic Shipping's multi-purpose offshore vessel Olympic Commander equipped with a 28 meters long Safeway Seagull type walk-to-work gangway system, has been deployed to transfer JDR technicians and goods during a maintenance campaign at the wind farm in the German North Sea.
The combination of vessel and motion compensated gangway is providing access for JDR technicians maintaining the inter-array cables between the offshore substation and the 72 Siemens wind turbines, at the wind farm located 90 kilometers off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
These cables also contain an optical fiber that allows for the data exchange between each wind turbine and the OSS, and also the remote control and surveillance of the wind farm by the Vattenfall Control Center in Esbjerg, Denmark.
Safeway also said that the Safeway A-Frame construction at the boom tip of the Seagull gangway also allows the operator to switch from People Transfer Mode to Cargo Transfer Mode, activating a lift capacity of 1,000 kg, "at the touch of a button."
“We are excited to continue our collaboration with Olympic Shipping and are thankful for the trust JDR Cables is showing in our combined services,” said Mario Kerssens, Safeway’s Sales & Marketing Director.
"Safeway and Olympic Shipping have already a lot of experience in the offshore wind sector and we are glad that directly after a successful campaign on the Rentel OWF in Belgium, we are now able to use those experiences to deliver our high quality transfer service on a project developed by Vattenfall, one of Europe’s largest producers of renewable energy determined to make fossil free living happen within one generation," Kerssens said.