“Thanet is going OK!” says Jan Thomsen, Project Director for Vestas. “We started putting up the turbines on 1 December, and since then we have been going full steam ahead.”
By 21 March Vestas had erected 38 of the project’s 100 turbines, with a further ten mechanically complete and ready for shipping out to the site.
Until recently the project has been lucky with the weather, Thomsen says: “We erected the previous batch of nine turbines in 12 days, which for the winter is pretty good. The current batch has been severely hit by weather downtime – but that’s what you expect at this time of year, and we still plan to finish on time.”
The original plan was not even to start installing the turbines before spring 2010. “Then our client, Vattenfall, learned that if they wanted the installation vessel Resolution beyond the end of July, they would have to commit themselves for another half year, which was not an attractive idea,” Thomsen explains.
“So they asked if we could bring the program forward by three months, and we agreed to work over the winter. It has been quite successful.”
More recently, he adds, the client has experienced some problems with the offshore substation and the inter-array cables which connect the turbines, as well as issues relating to the weather.
As a result, it has been decided to postpone the energization date of the project by two months, until 1 May. “We have put in some initiatives which will reduce the net effect of that delay to something like ten days,” Thomsen says. “So yes, we’re doing fairly OK.”
Terms explained
Mechanical completion: The point at which a complete wind turbine (tower, nacelle, hub and blades) are in place; further electrical work remains before the turbine can start generating
Energization: The point at which a turbine starts generating power
