The North Sea wind power development. called the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre (EOWDC), consists of a total of 11 turbines.
In a press release on Monday, Vattenfall announced the EOWDC offshore wind farm had generated power for the first time on Sunday, July 1, 2018.
Partly funded by the European Union, the wind farm’s 11 huge turbines, with a maximum height of 190 meters (623 feet), make them more than twice the size of the Statue of Liberty. Two of the machines are rated at 8.8 megawatts, making them the world’s most powerful turbines at the moment.
Scotland’s largest offshore wind test site generates first power | Press Release | Vattenfall | EOWDC kkTZFxX8VF
— Vattenfall UK (@VattenfallUK) July 2, 2018
Power from the turbines is sent to a substation at Blackdog via an innovative 66 kilovolt (kV) subsea cabling system – the first time that cabling of this capacity has been installed on a commercial offshore wind project in Scotland.
Gunnar Groebler, Vattenfall’s head of Business Area Wind, said: “Generating power from the EOWDC for the first time, secured by Europe’s technological leadership in offshore wind, gets us to a future free from fossil fuel faster. I look forward to full power later in the summer.”
Adam Ezzamel, Vattenfall’s EOWDC project director, said: “We have overcome major engineering and technical challenges to achieve first power on the cutting edge EOWDC thanks to the collective expertise of Vattenfall, and our contractors MHI Vestas, Boskalis and Murphy. Our priority now is to fully commission the windfarm safely throughout the summer.”
The output from EOWDC will add significantly to Scotland’s renewable electricity generating capacity. In figures released last month, installed capacity reached a record 10.4GW in the first three months of 2018. The report also indicated renewable sources met an equivalent of 69% of Scotland’s electricity demand in 2017, according to reporting in the BBC.
