Europe | February 17, 2022

TenneT awards contract to international consortium

Germany: TenneT has awarded the contract for the converter stations at sea and on land to McDermott and GEIRI/C-EPRI consortium.

 

Image source: TenneT

Germany: TenneT has awarded the contract for the converter stations at sea and on land to McDermott and GEIRI/C-EPRI consortium.

The contract was awarded in the tendering process for the construction of the 235-km-long offshore grid connection system BorWin6.

“With regard to the high expansion targets for offshore wind energy in the North Sea, we are pleased that an international consortium was able to prevail in our tendering procedure. Even though this consortium is new to us, it has a lot of experience in the offshore as well as the high-voltage direct current transmission (HVDC) business,” said Tim Meyerjürgens, COO of TenneT. “As a transmission system operator, we will need many reliable partners in the coming years to enable the offshore expansion at the desired pace and with the targeted connection capacities. In terms of speeding up the process, we have taken the lead with this project: It was initially planned with a connection capacity of 930 MW. In the technical planning, we were able to increase the capacity by 50 MW. The project was recently confirmed in the latest grid development plan.”

The direct connection principle is also used for BorWin6, which means that TenneT connects the wind turbines directly to TenneT’s offshore platform BorWin kappa via 66-kV three-phase cables. This eliminates the need of transformer stations that were previously necessary in each and every wind farm. In addition, 155-kV three-phase cables are not required to connect TenneT’s offshore platform with that of the wind farm. Economically speaking, this innovative technology leads to enormous cost savings.

BorWin6 is the last offshore grid connection system to be implemented by TenneT in the German North Sea with 320 kV technology. The technological leap to 525 kV and a transmission capacity of 2 GW will be implemented in future projects. BorWin6 is scheduled to go into operation in 2027.

Source: TenneT