Norwegian maritime equipment and technology company Kongsberg Maritime has won a contract to deliver key positioning and monitoring equipment to Equinor’s Hywind Tampen floating wind farm in Norway. The contract was signed with engineering firm Wood.
The 88 MW Hywind Tampen floating wind farm - to be the world's largest of the type - will serve as the power source for five of Equinor's offshore oil and gas platforms in Norway, Snorre A and B, and Gullfaks A, B and C.
"The 88MW installation is the first of its type to be installed to supply renewable energy directly to offshore oil and gas platforms, and Kongsberg Maritime will supply technologies from its existing offshore product portfolio to meet the specific challenges posed by operating in this challenging and sometimes hostile environment.," Kongsberg said.
Kongsberg Maritime said that its portfolio of solutions for positioning in the offshore environment was built on many years of experience and application know-how, and that core to this product delivery is its DPS position reference system and Motion Reference Unit (MRU).
"The DPS exploits all available GNSS infrastructure to deliver continuously available, reliable position information, and is ideally suited to monitor the location of the turbines relative to the seabed. This will help to ensure secure, safe and optimal positioning for each unit within the wind farm," Kongsberg explained.
The MRU, Kongsberg said, will check roll, pitch, yaw, and heave motion, informing the blade trimming system to ensure that the turbine is not overloaded in strong winds and thus likely to become unstable. Marine traffic situational awareness and visibility to other vessels will be facilitated by the AIS AQ610 base station.
