As Director of Van Oord Offshore Wind Projects b.v., Johan van Wijland is a familiar face to many in the industry. He’s also a regular contributor to PES and joins us once again to discuss the company’s latest developments. New vessels? Massive monopiles? The Luchterduinen and Gemini projects? All are covered right here…
PES: Welcome back once again to PES. For the benefit of our new readers, would you mind explaining a little about the company and how it serves the wind industry?
Johan van Wijland: Van Oord is a marine contractor with a long track record in dredging, offshore oil & gas and, since the last decade, also in offshore wind. Van Oord’s strategy is to build the entire Balance of Plant of an offshore wind farm on EPC basis. With the Balance of Plant we mean literally everything, including the onshore and offshore high voltage substations, the onshore and offshore export cables, the cables within the wind farm between the turbines, the foundations and the scour protection.
The only component that we do not supply is the wind turbine itself.
We do that on an EPC basis, meaning that we want to be responsible for the design, the engineering, the procurement and the installation. As an additional activity we offer our vessels and equipment also for transport and installation activities only.
PES: And how has business been this past year?
JvW: This year has been extremely busy. It started very exiting with the acquisition of the assets of Ballast Nedam Offshore: the vessel Svanen, the 45 staff members and the project Westermeerwind. In March we had the name giving ceremony of the new cable-laying vessel Nexus and in June the offshore installation vessel Aeolus completed the installation of the Eneco Luchterduinen wind park west of the coast of The Netherlands. The same month we started with the installation work for the Gemini wind park north of The Netherlands, of which we completed all the 150 foundations in October, both the offshore transformer stations and the onshore transformer station plus all the export cables connecting them.
