ABB Group will connect North Sea wind farms with Germany
EWPA's blog - etea August 3, 2011
ABB, power and automation technology group, has won the largest power transmission order in its history worth around $1 billion to supply a power link connecting offshore North Sea wind farms to the German mainland grid.
Scheduled to be operational in 2015, this 900MW offshore network called DolWin 2 will both supply more than 1.5 million households with clean wind-generated electricity and also help to avoid more than three million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year by replacing fossil-fuel based generation. The completed link will be capable of Germany’s installed wind power capacity of over 27 GW presently meets about eight percent of its electricity requirements. Plans are to double that by 2020. „Offshore wind power is emerging as a major source of large-scale renewable energy in Europe to help meet emission targets and lower environmental impact,” said Peter Leupp, head of ABB’s Power Systems division
ABB will design, engineer, supply and install the offshore platform, the offshore and onshore converter stations and the land and sea cable systems. The transmission technology will transport power from the 400 MW Gode Wind II and other wind farms to an offshore HVDC converter station, which will transmit the electricity to the onshore HVDC station at Dörpen on the German coast via 135 kilometers of underwater and underground cables. A converter station here will feed electricity into the mainland grid.