Jan De Nul Delivers Haliade Cable Link

In the North Sea, in front of the Belgian coast, Alstom has installed its first Haliade turbine within the Belwind facility.

Jan De Nul Group earlier installed the rock scour protection around the jacket foundation of the turbine with its Fallpipe Vessel ‘Simon Stevin’.

This time however the ‘Simon Stevin’ returned to the wind farm to install a 33kV cable to connect the Haliade turbine to Belwind’s OHVS. After having secured this array cable installation contract last spring, Jan De Nul Group started the engineering and preparation works to ensure a fast and successful project completion.

The scope involved the installation of the 1,852 m array cable, CPU installation, post-trenching and scour protection.

For the project, the Simon Stevin was fitted with cable laying equipment on the aft deck, with a SMD CT1 jet trencher for the cable burial, launched from the vessels fall pipe moonpool, and with a Cougar XT to assist with the pull-in operations and for Touch Down Monitoring.

Rock installation at the two crossings, as well as the OHVS and WTG was done using vessel’s inclined fall pipe. This allowed the vessel to work in close proximity to these offshore structures as the rock had to cover the cable up to the entrance of the J-tubes. As such Jan De Nul Group managed to complete the whole installation with a single vessel only.