Island Of Borkum News

North Star has secured a contract with energy utility giant EnBW to deliver a new hybrid-electric service operations vessel (SOV) on a decade-long minimum charter to service the He Dreiht wind farm off the coast of Germany.The agreement marks the company’s first offshore wind move outside the UK market, a milestone mark in its ambitious European growth strategy to add 40 new SOVs to its fleet by 2040.The newbuild is of VARD 407 design which has been tailored to meet EnBW’s specific…

Vattenfall and BASF are in advanced and exclusive discussions to partner on the Nordlicht 1 and 2 projects through a sale of 49 percent of the project shares to BASF. Both parties signed a Memorandum of Understanding to formally express their joint ambition. The Nordlicht wind park zone is located 85 km north of the island of Borkum in the German North Sea and consists of two separate sites: Nordlicht 1 with a capacity of 980 MW and Nordlicht 2 with 630 MW. Vattenfall develops and constructs the Nordlicht sites.

An upgrade by Kongsberg Maritime of the waterjets on a catamaran ferry operated by the family-run firm of AG EMS brings a new level of efficiency and environmental consideration to a route traversed by the company for 143 years.Claus Hirsch, the fleet manager with AG EMS, is a likable and personable individual. His easy demeanor suggests that he is contented with his lot in life, and no one would blame him for that. The company he works for is a family-run concern with a benevolent…

German wind turbine builder is carrying out a condition monitoring campaign at the 402MW Veja Mate offshore wind farm in the German North Sea.The rotor blade condition monitoring system or fos4X “retroX” system, consisting of a sensor platform and intelligent software, was installed on strategically selected 10% of the wind farm’s turbines."The system enables structural condition monitoring of the rotor blades, recording of loads during turbine life time as well as the detection of yaw and pitch misalignment," said a press note from the specialist in fiber optic measurement technology and sensor technology.A further aspect of the joint project carried out by fos4X is the monitoring, consolidation and orchestration of the entire turbine and subsystem data.

Installation is underway at Northland Power’s Deutsche Bucht offshore wind farm as MHI Vestas and other installation partners have successfully installed the first of 33 wind turbines.Deutsche Bucht, located 95 km northwest of the island of Borkum in the German North Sea, will be powered by 33 V164-8.4 MW turbines from MHI Vestas Offshore Wind.“We are very pleased to see the first turbine successfully installed at Deutsche Bucht,” said Flemming Ougaard, MHI Vestas Chief Operations Officer. “The project is an important one for MHI Vestas and our partners, not only because of our growing experience in Germany, but also our contribution to the German energy transition.The project…

A consortium led by asset manager Commerz Real AG, WPD Invest, KGAL and IKEA franchisee Ingka Group will acquire an 80% stake in the 402-MW Veja Mate offshore wind park in the German North Sea.Veja Mate offshore wind park in the North Sea  is the second-largest German offshore wind farm with 67 turbines and a capacity of 402 megawatts. The total investment comes more than two billion eurosCommerz Real and Ingka Group said in a joint statement today that they will each invest more than EUR 200 million (USD 226m) in the project company for the 67-turbine wind park.The other members of the buying consortium are Wpd invest GmbH and investment manager KGAL, while the sellers are Highland Group Holdings, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and Siemens Financial Services.

MSC has started cleaning up Dutch sea waters, 10 days after it lost nearly 300 containers from one of its largest cargo vessels in a storm."The clean up will likely take months," Dutch water authorities spokesman Edwin de Feijter said. "The largest part of the debris has been located, but there are still parts missing."291 containers, some holding hazardous chemicals, fell off one of the world's largest container ships, the MSC Zoe, on Jan. 2 in German waters near the island of Borkum during a North Sea storm.Two salvage ships left the harbor at IJmuiden…

Clean-up efforts after a container ship spill off the Dutch coast are being hampered by rough weather although progress is being made, the Swiss based vessel's owner MSC said on Wednesday.In one of the worst incidents off the coast of the Netherlands, more than 250 containers - some holding hazardous chemicals - fell off the MSC Zoe, one of the world's largest container ships, during a North Sea storm on Jan. 2."This week, a storm is impacting the area being cleaned and unfortunately this will interrupt some operations," MSC said on Wednesday.

Northland Deutsche Bucht has completed the installation of all 31 foundations for its offshore wind farm project in the North Sea.The  Canadian power producer of Northland Power's third offshore wind farm which is  about 95 kilometres to the northwet of the North Sea island of Borkum in Germany’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), pointed out that this successfully concludes the first phase of construction within the planned timeframe.Jens Poulsen, Project Director of Northland Deutsche Bucht GmbH, says: “Installation work on the construction site, which is more than 100 kilometers off the coast, is a real challenge in the winter months.

Dutch authorities will hold Swiss shipping line MSC liable for the cost of cleaning up debris from more than 270 cargo containers that fell off one of its vessels and washed up on shore, officials said on Friday.The Dutch coastguard said a criminal investigation had been launched by prosecutors into the incident, one of the largest of its kind off the coast of the Netherlands.The containers, some holding hazardous chemicals, fell off one of the world's largest container ships…

A load of dangerous chemicals that fell off one of the world's largest container ships into the North Sea washed up on a Dutch beach on Thursday, and more debris was expected to land overnight, officials said.The Dutch Defence Ministry said the loss of 270 containers from the freighter MSC Zoe on Wednesday, some of them thought to contain hazardous chemicals, was one of the biggest incidents of its kind, they said.It was unclear how many of the containers sank to the sea bottom…

DEME Group’s offshore marine engineering subsidiary GeoSea said that, following successful completion of the design, it also received the Notice to Proceed for fabrication and offshore installation of 16 wind turbine foundations and 1 Offshore Transformer Module (OTM) for the EnBW Albatros offshore wind farm, for which GeoSea is Siemens’ EPCI partner. This partnership enables Siemens to provide a full-scope project (offshore wind turbines and OTM, incl. foundations) to EnBW. The Albatros offshore wind farm is located in the so-called “exclusive economic zone” of the North Sea, in the  immediate vicinity of the EnBW windfarms Hohe See and He Dreiht, approximately 90 km north of the island of Borkum in the German North Sea.

Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V. (Boskalis) announces that its subsidiary VBMS has been awarded an inter-array cabling contract with a value of approximately EUR 80 million by EnBW Hohe See GmbH & Co.KG for the 500 MW EnBW Hohe See Offshore Wind Farm. The contract includes the supply, installation and burial as well as termination and testing of seventy nine (79) 33kV inter-array cables. The project execution will commence in 2017 with cable installation activities scheduled for 2018 and 2019. The Hohe See offshore wind farm is situated approximately 90 kilometers north of the island of Borkum in the German North Sea. The project will cover an area of around 40 square kilometers with water depths of up to 40 meters.

The new SeaZip service catamarans are set to sail for North Sea offshore wind farm. In Harlingen (the Netherlands), two newly-constructed Damen ‘Twin Axe’ catamaran ships of the FCS 2610 type were officially named on March, 22. These ships will soon be deployed in the completion stage of a large-scale wind farm on the North Sea, 90 km northwest of the island of Borkum. This offshore wind farm is being constructed by the German BARD Group, which will charter the vessels from their owner, SeaZip Offshore Service - a sister company of JR Shipping Group in Harlingen.

SeaRenergy Offshore has been selected by Siemens for the transportation and installation of two HVDC converter platforms for the offshore wind cluster BorWin 2 and HelWin 1 in the North Sea. The platforms which consist of a base frame and a topside shall be towed from Nordic Yards in Wismar and Warnemünde to the designated sites in the North Sea. SeaRenergy will install the converter platform BorWin 2 about 125 kilometers off the coast, northwest of the island of Borkum, in a water depth of about 40 meters. BorWin 2 will be connected to the wind farms Veja Mate and Global Tech 1, which will have a combined power generating capacity of 800 megawatts (MW).

The launch ceremony for the NEPTUNE took place on 23 September 2011 at the IHC Merwede shipyard in Krimpen aan den IJssel, The Netherlands. The self-elevating heavy-lift jack-up vessel is being built by IHC Merwede for GeoSea NV, the offshore marine construction specialist company within the DEME Group, based in Belgium. The contract for the detailed design, construction and delivery of the vessel was signed between GeoSea and IHC Merwede on 16 September 2010 and the keel was laid on 25 March 2011.

Noble Denton and Germanischer Lloyd (GL) will support European leading utilities cooperative Trianel GmbH with technical support and project management of its 400 MW offshore wind farm Borkum West II. The installation of the first phase is scheduled to start in 2011/2012. It consists of 40 of the planned 80 turbines on the site and the Offshore Substation. The wind farm will be located approximately 45 km north of the German island of Borkum. The site is immediately adjacent to the smaller Alpha Ventus site which is currently under development. Noble Denton will support Trianel during the pre-construction phase project development and will be in charge with the appropriate project management systems.

The German aids-to-navigation-service, WSD Nord-West/WSA Emden, has decided to install Transas shore-based Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) technology on board the first research platform for planned Offshore Wind Farms. The VTS technology will enable the authorities to survey and assess the navigational traffic density in the German North Sea. The contract has been awarded to Transas Europe GmbH, the Transas Group representative in Western Europe. Financed by the Federal Ministry for the Environment…