Monday, December 3, 2018 — DEME’s subsidiaries Dredging International, GeoSea and Tideway have secured major contract awards for the 487 MW SeaMade Offshore Wind Farm in Belgium. The project reached financial close on December 3, 2018.
The contract awards include:
Foundations, turbines and inter-array cables – The Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Installation (EPCI) contract for the 58 foundations and the inter-array cables will be undertaken by Dredging International. The cables will connect each turbine to the relevant offshore substation. The foundation type will be a monopile foundation. With a hub height of 109 metres and a rotor diameter of 167 metres, the wind turbines will be the largest installed thus far in the Belgian North Sea.
Substations – Each of SeaMade’s two wind farms, Mermaid and Seastar, will have its own offshore substation, which will collect electricity produced, convert it from 33 kV to 220 kV and export it into the grid. After a successful collaboration on numerous offshore wind farms, GeoSea, ENGIE and Smulders join forces again for the SeaMade project. The partnership will be responsible for the full engineering, procurement, construction, transport, installation and commissioning of the two high voltage substations.
Export cables – Both wind farms will be connected through two 220 kV submarine high voltage cables to the Belgian Modular Offshore Grid. In a consortium with Hellenic Cables, Tideway will be responsible for the design, manufacturing and installation operations, and for connecting the wind farms high voltage substations to the Belgian Modular Offshore Grid. The export cables have a combined length of approximately 28 km.
The construction of the project has already been initiated with offshore works to start in summer 2019. Both wind farms are planned to be operational before the end of 2020.
The total value of the contracts awarded to DEME is about EUR 500 mio.
Alain Bernard, Director and CEO: “DEME and its subsidiaries are proud to contribute to a sustainable energy transition in Belgium. We are an early mover in the offshore wind market in our home country. We will deploy our specialised high-tech equipment, know-how and local experience to efficiently and safely carry out the SeaMade project, as well as export this valuable experience in many projects in Europe and beyond. After the successful cooperation for the Rentel project we will again use the REBO site in the port of Ostend as our base for wind turbine assembly, transport and installation. Also, we look forward to working with our strong partner network and all stakeholders on the SeaMade project, and are confident also in the future our combined expertise can play a major role in Belgium’s ambition to double offshore wind capacity to 4 GW by 2025.”
ABOUT DEME GROUP
The Belgian dredging, environmental and marine engineering group DEME is an international market leader for complex marine engineering works.
Building on more than 140 years of experience and know-how, DEME has organically moved into several related sectors, such as the financing of marine engineering and environmental projects, executing complex EPCI related marine engineering projects including civil engineering works, the development and construction of renewable energy projects, providing services for the oil, gas and energy sector, the decontaminating and recycling of polluted soils and silts, the harvesting of marine resources, etc.
Thanks to an integrated company structure, DEME strongly emerges as a ‘global solutions provider’ which offers its clients overall solutions. DEME has the most modern, high-tech and versatile fleet.
DEME Group has 5,100 employees worldwide and achieved a turnover of 2.37 billion euros in 2017.