Jan De Nul Group reaches another significant milestone by completing the installation of four medium-voltage export cables connecting the offshore wind farm to the shore, as well as the upgrade of the onshore substation in Changhua County.
This substation upgrade was essential for the connection of the first state-owned wind farm ‘Taiwan Power Company Offshore Windfarm Phase 1 Project – Demonstration’ to the Taiwanese power grid.
Jan De Nul’s Cable-Laying Vessel Willem de Vlamingh successfully installed the four subsea export cables from the offshore wind farm site, 10 km off the coast, to the shore where they were connected at the landfall area near Fangyuan.
For the complex beach pull-in operations including passing over a shallow water sandbank, Jan De Nul Group teamed up with its Taiwanese partner Hung Hua Construction who provided essential marine equipment, including a jack-up barge.
Due to the presence of a nearshore oyster farm and an important shipping lane for fishermen on the subsea export cables route, the cables had to be pulled through 1km-long underground ducts, which had previously been installed by horizontal directional drilling (HDD) up to 21 metres below the seabed.
“Originally, the HDD’s were stipulated in the contract to be 300 meters long, but Jan De Nul decided to extend them in order to prevent any damage to the sensitive coastal zone and fish farms. As such, we demonstrate once more Jan De Nul’s global care for the environment. Our offshore cable team did an amazing job, as did our onshore civil construction team who worked on the HDD together with Taiwanese companies Hung Hua and Magitech,” says Jan Kop, Project Director at Jan De Nul Group.