Siemens has further reinforced its commanding position in the North Sea by winning another big order for wind turbines, this time 80 units for the Butendiek project offshore Germany.
The agreement also covers a long-term maintenance contract for a period of ten years, the first of its kind for an offshore wind project. Siemens is to provide a new logistics concept that includes a service operation vessel specially developed for deployments to offshore wind facilities.
The deal is worth more than £600million (700million euros). This project company is made up of five investors: Siemens Financial Services, Marguerite Fund, Industriens Pension, PKA A/S (22.5% each) and wpd AG (10%).
When the Butendiek project comes onstream in 2015, it will have a total generating capacity of 288 megawatts . . . enough to supply some 370,000 households.
The Butendiek complex will be installed about 32km west of the island of Sylt, near the German-Danish border, and is the second project-financed offshore wind power plant in Germany for which Siemens is supplying wind turbines and services.
The turbines, each with a capacity of 3.6MW and a rotor diameter of 120m, are to be erected across a surface area of 42sq. km in about 20m water depth.
Siemens is also to provide a comprehensive services package covering remote monitoring and diagnostics solutions, plus state-of-the-art weather forecasting techniques designed to enable anticipatory, forward-looking service planning to enable maintenance work to be performed in bundled packages.
The manufacturer claims to have developed a new, customised logistics concept for Butendiek: whereby Siemens’ service technicians will live and work on board a specially-designed ship, the service operation vessel.