Norway's Kongsberg Maritime has secured a deal to supply positioning and monitoring equipment to Equinor’s Hywind Tampen floating wind farm, which is set to be the world's largest such floating facility.
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The deal for work at what will be the world’s first floating wind farm to power offshore oil and gas platforms is part of a contract with UK contractor Wood.
The 88 megawatt Hywind Tampen floating wind power project is set to directly provide renewable energy power to platforms on the producing Snorre and Gullfaks fields in the Norwegian North Sea.
It will also be the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm and an essential step in industrialising solutions and reducing costs for future offshore wind power projects.
Kongsberg will supply technologies from its existing offshore product portfolio to meet the specific challenges posed by operating in the harsh environment.
By using proven equipment that is already proven in other areas of the offshore maritime market, Kongsberg said it is able to “ensure safe, tried-and-tested performance whilst at the same time reducing both cost and development time”.
Central to the contractor’s equipment offerings is its DPS position reference system and motion reference unit (MRU).
The DPS exploits all available global navigation satellite system infrastructure to deliver continuously available, reliable position information and is ideally suited to monitor the location of the turbines relative to the seabed, Kongsberge said.
This will help to ensure secure, safe and optimal positioning for each unit within the wind farm.
The MRU checks roll, pitch, yaw and heave motion — informing the blade trimming system to ensure that the turbine is not overloaded in strong winds and therefore likely to become unstable.
Marine traffic situational awareness and visibility to other vessels will be facilitated by the AIS AQ610 base station. All of Kongsberg’s equipment permits remote access and monitoring.
