Thursday 24 September 2020

Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 23 September 2020 – Van Oord’s Deep Dig-It trencher crossed the busy shipping route Rotterdam Maasmond successfully and is on its way to offshore Alpha jacket in the Hollandse Kust (zuid) wind farm area. TenneT is building the Hollandse Kust (zuid) offshore grid to connect new offshore wind farms. 4 cables will have to be buried into the North Sea seabed for this purpose. For the first 10 kilometres of the cable route, these cables will have to be buried more than 5 metres into the seabed in order to cross the busy shipping route Rotterdam Maasmond.

The Van Oord-Hellenic Cables consortium will be installing 4 subsea 220 kV AC cables that will connect 2 offshore platforms to the onshore electricity grid. The first 2 cables to the Alpha platform will be installed this year. The other 2 cables, meant for the Beta platform, will follow in 2021. The last few days the preparatory work has been completed. The cable was pulled ashore via a direct drill to the new transformer substation that is being built on the Maasvlakte. From this point, the cable with a total length of 42 kilometres to the wind zone Hollandse Kust (zuid) will be laid by the Deep Dig-It, a large remote-controlled trencher.