Wednesday this week, DBB Jack-Up’s newbuild, J/U WIND SERVER was awarded the Offshore Renewables Award 2015 at the Annual Offshore Support Journal’s conference in London.
The award was given to J/U WIND SERVER as the vessel provides a new way to service and maintain offshore wind turbines and fills a gap in the market between larger, more costly installation vessels and less capable units.
The design of J/U WIND SERVER has focused on bringing down cost of energy. Among many of the vessel’s advantages, the following should be highlighted: Speed, serviceability and redundancy: The vessel is capable of jacking up and down very quickly i.e. 1 metre per minute; serviceability is an integrated part of the advanced design; and finally, the jacking system has so much built-in redundancy that it can have a breakdown of 25% of its drive units and still continue jacking with 100% load.
The vessel is the world’s first purpose-built jack-up vessel for O&M tasks, but J/U WIND SERVER is also very capable of handling decommissioning and installation support tasks. The vessel carried out her very first jacking operation only last week with the decommissioning of a met mast in the North Sea.