Orsted: subsea cable problem could exist elsewhere

摘要

The Danish wind power firm Orsted has warned that some of its giant offshore windfarms around the U.K. and Europe may need to have further protection for their array cables, and that some cables will likely need to be either repaired or replaced, a project that carries a worse-case scenario of {EUR}403 million. In the company's latest quarterly report, orsted outlined the problem, which was discovered after its Race Bank offshore windfarm (91 turbines) off the Norfolk coast, suffered an outage due to cable damage caused by the seabed rocks, which led to further investigation. "We have discovered an array cable issue on several offshore wind farms across the U.K. and Continental Europe. The issue, which could concern up to 10 of our wind farms, occurs when the cable protection system (CPS) moves across the scour protection (i.e. rocks placed on the seabed around the foundations to avoid seabed erosion), abrading the CPS and in the worst-case scenario (causing) the cables to fail."