At the end of 2019 Climate Fund Managers managed to financially close a 48 MW near shore wind project in the Mekong Delta area of Vietnam as well as a 60 MW wind project in Djibouti.
The Vietnam project was developed nearly from scratch in a period of about 28 months and Djibouti at a breakneck speed in about 18 months. This shows that fully Equity Financing of the construction without the Project Finance process cuts off a massive amount of development time and costs.
In Vietnam Climate Fund Managers have now started construction of the Tra Vinh near shore project with Vestas taking on the EPC package. The company envisage commercial operations to commence by June 2021.
The project will consist of 12 x Vestas V150-4.2MW with 105m hub heights in a single line layout. The average wind at the site being 7.3 m/s.
To reduce O&M costs the turbines are linked by a concrete bridge which allows accessibility to the turbines under all weather conditions. This also means that no submarine cables are required as the entire electrical cabling infrastructure will be incorporated into the link bridge. The project substation is located on-shore close to where the link bridge attaches to the shore. From there the power is evacuated along a 220 kV overhead line to the Vietnamese Utility’s substation. As for the foundations, the EPC Contractor has opted for a classic multi-pile concrete foundation cap similar to land based wind turbine foundations.
Swapping the humid conditions of the Mekong Delta for the desert on the African continent, the Djibouti project sees Siemens Gamesa as our EPC Contractor supplying 17 x G132-3.465 turbines with a hub height of 84-m.
This desert country has an enormous potential for indigenous renewable energy sources being blessed with arguably the best wind resource in Africa, incredible irradiation levels and more than their fair share of geothermal resource. The wind speed at site is a whopping 9,4 m/s giving a capacity factor of 52%. From the wind farm substation Climate Fund Managers is also building a 5-km overhead line to connect to the grid. By realising this wind farm, Djibouti becomes less dependent on it’s huge neighbour Ethiopia for its electricity needs and can even export excess power to Ethiopia in low demand situations. Commercial operations are slated to start by the third quarter of 2021.
Tractebel, the Belgian engineering firm will be taking on the Owners Engineering role having been our Technical Advisor during the Development phase. Shown is a picture of the site prior to construction.
