Contracted by JDR Cables, a world-class provider of subsea technologies and services, the multi-purpose offshore vessel Olympic Commander equipped with a 28 metre-long Safeway Seagull type walk-to-work gangway system, has been deployed for the efficient transfer of people and goods during a maintenance campaign at the Sandbank Wind Farm in the German North Sea.
The presence of a smart Safeway A-Frame construction at the boom tip of the Seagull gangway also allows the operator to switch from People Transfer Mode to Cargo Transfer Mode, activating a lift capacity of 1,000 kg, at the touch of a button.
The Sandbank offshore windfarm has been finalized in 2017 and is located 90 kilometres off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It is the second joint project between Vattenfall and Stadtwerke München. The two companies have already jointly implemented the DanTysk wind farm.
This particular maintenance project started already in September and the combination of vessel and motion compensated gangway is providing safe, easy and direct access for JDR technicians maintaining the inter array cables between the offshore substation and the 72 Siemens wind turbines. These cables also contain an optical fiber that not only allows for the data exchange between each wind turbine and the OSS, but also the remote control and surveillance of the wind farm by the Vattenfall Control Center in Esbjerg, Denmark.
“We are excited to continue our collaboration with Olympic Shipping and are thankful for the trust JDR Cables is showing in our combined services,” said Mario Kerssens, Safeway’s Sales & Marketing Director. “Safeway and Olympic Shipping have already a lot of experience in the offshore wind sector and we are glad that directly after a successful campaign on the Rentel OWF in Belgium, we are now able to use those experiences to deliver our high quality transfer service on a project developed by Vattenfall, one of Europe’s largest producers of renewable energy determined to make fossil free living happen within one generation.”
The Safeway Seagull gangway type is developed for retrofitting on existing vessels and has been operational since early 2017. It’s specific features such as 10m vertical elevation range, hover mode, and easy plug & play installation makes it the ideal tool for offshore maintenance campaigns.