Recently, Spanish offshore contractor Dragados Offshore announced on its website that it has won an Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Installation (EPCI) contract for an offshore project in conjunction with Siemens Energy to build a new converter system for the LanWin3 Offshore Grid Connection Project in the German North Sea.
The offshore platform will be built at Dragados Offshore yard in Cádiz, southern Spain while the HVDC components for the converter will be manufactured at European production sites by Siemens Energy. The converter systems will follow the 2 GW standard currently being designed for transmission system operators TenneT, Amprion and now also 50Hertz.
The LanWin3 offshore grid connection will connect an offshore wind farm in the North Sea to the mainland. It is located around 120 kilometers northwest of Helgoland within the German Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). From there, a sea and land cable will run over 200 kilometers long to the grid connection point in the Heide area in North Friesland.
On the land side, the offshore grid connection systems LanWin3 (50Hertz) and LanWin2 (TenneT) will be connected there to the NordOstLink, a new high-performance high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line to be built in the direction of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The onshore counterpart to the offshore converter is to be built near Schwerin in order to convert the direct current into alternating current. Both the offshore grid connections and the HVDC will have a voltage level of 525 kV to be able to transport large amounts of electricity with low losses.
The award of this project welcomes 50Hertz as a new client to the HVDC offshore business, and gives Dragados Offshore an important continuity in the delivery of renewable energy projects of 2GW HVDC platforms.
Founded in 1972, Dragados Offshore is understood to be an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor in the oil, gas and other energy-related industries. The business scope covers detailed design, construction, procurement, construction, transportation, commissioning, offshore installation, connections, onshore modular fabrication, special projects based on large steel structures for offshore fixed platforms, offshore floating platforms, offshore wind power, subsea systems and shallow water pipelines.
Currently, Dragados Offshore has a number of offshore shipyards around the world. the Cádiz Shipyard, the headquarters of Dragados Offshore, was founded in 1975. Located on the Atlantic coast, the shipyard underwent two major rebuilds in 2003 and 2009, which included the construction of a new office area, storage area, workshops, berthing area and deepwater jetty, making it one of the most modern shipyards in Europe, with 22 specialized fabrication workshops, including piping, sandblasting and coating, and a docking and storage area of more than 86,000 square meters.