The Lincs Offshore Wind Farm

Design and delivery of turnkey integrated Engineering solutions for the array cabling on the Lincs Offshore Wind Farm, including cable installation, termination, testing and commissioning.

BACKGROUND

The Lincolnshire offshore wind farm is located off the coast of Skegness, North of the wash off the East coast of England. The site consists of 75 x 3.6MW wind turbines connected to an offshore substation, the offshore substation is connected via 2 export cables to a grid connection point located at Warpole. The field developer is Renewable Energy Systems (RES) Ltd and owners include Centrica Renewables Ltd, DONG Wind Ltd and Siemens AG, the total cost of the project is estimated at £1 billion and the field is expected to be operational by early 2013.

KEY SERVICES

Array Cable Terminating, Jointing, Testing & Commissioning
Subsea Cable Design
Project Management
Installation
DESIGN PHASE

ACEDA were commissioned through the Centrica supply chain to provide a network design for the Fibre Optic Backbone across the Lincs Project, this resilient design incorporated the requirements of the Siemens SCADA Control System, CCTV and other services. During the key stages of the design phase, ACEDA formed an integral part of the clients design team and attended numerous meetings to provide detailed schematic and termination drawings for approval and subsequent construction.

PROJECT INSIGHT

Following the design phase, ACEDA deployed a specialist team of Engineers to work alongside key disciplines on the installation, termination, testing and commissioning of the array cables. Each team of Engineers had multi-skilled capabilities to ensure each element of the project was completed to the highest standards.

ACEDA used specialist Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) equipment to analyse, test and commission the fibre optic cables to ensure their performance was within the required guidelines or additionally had not been damaged during the initial cable-laying phase.

Within the design phase a key factor to facilitate project scalability was to provide a design which met both the short term IP connectivity requirements and the future scalability for further integration of ancillary IP edge devices, for example monitoring, CCTV surveillance and access control.

The ACEDA philosophy for continuous improvement from evolution to execution has given an enhanced capability for future projects, particularly in multi-skilling and logistics in the offshore wind sector.