Scroby Sands is one of the UK's first commercial offshore wind farms. Located on the Scroby Sands sandbank in the North Sea, 2.5 kilometres off the coast of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, it has an installed capacity of 60 megawatts and is able to power over 48,000 households.
Scroby Sands was one of the first of a group of projects to be built in the UK, and all in coastal locations with relatively shallow waters close to shore. Scroby Sands was built on a prehistoric sandbank and, because of natural changes in the marine environment and coastal erosion, this has risen over time effectively isolating four turbines from being accessed by service vessels.
RWE, in partnership with Commercial Rib Charters (CRC), is driving an offshore wind revolution, with the innovative design and build of a world-first amphibious vessel for reaching offshore wind farms in shallow waters.
The Amrumbank wind farm covers an area of approximately 32 km² and is located around 35 km north of the island of Heligoland and 37 km west of the North Frisian island of Amrum, inside the German Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The distance from the nearest mainland coast is approximately 40 km. The offshore wind farm consists of 80 Siemens SWT-3.6-120 wind turbines with an installed capacity of 3.6 MW each, 288 MW in total. This is enough power to supply around 300,000 households with renewable energy, saving 432,278 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually.
The turbines have a rotor diameter of 120 m (each rotor blade is 58.5 m long) and are situated in waters between 20 and 25 metres deep. The investment volume of the project was close to 1 billion euros.
Galloper Offshore Wind Farm is a 353MW wind farm project, located approximately 30km off the coast of Suffolk. The 353 megawatt wind farm officially opened in September 2018. Each year Galloper’s 56 turbines generate enough green electricity to power the equivalent of more than 444,000 homes.
Construction of Galloper Offshore Wind Farm started with onshore works in late 2015 with offshore construction getting underway in the summer of 2016. First power was generated by the wind farm in November 2017 and it became fully operational in March 2018. A 60-strong team operates and maintains the wind farm from a state-of-the-art, purpose-built Operations & Maintenance facility in Harwich International Port on the Essex coast.
The Arkona wind farm is located 35 kilometers northeast of the island of Rügen. The wind farm has a capacity of 385 megawatts and can supply approximately 400,000 households with renewable energy. The investment volume amounts to €1.2 billion. Compared to conventionally generated electricity, Arkona saves up to 1.2 million tons of CO2 annually. 60 turbines of the six-megawatt class from Siemens were installed. Arkona is a joint venture.
The partner companies were able to connect the Arkona offshore wind farm to the grid on time and at lower costs than originally calculated. It took only one year from the first ramming to the first electricity feed-in. Rarely before has an offshore project been completed so quickly. The reasons for the success of the fast completion are the detailed planning and the professionally implemented construction process. This is accompanied by the close cooperation with 50Hertz and the precisely coordinated partial feed-in option into the German extra-high voltage grid, which was made possible by the transmission grid operator before the connection was completed.
The 1.4 gigawatt (GW) Sofia Offshore Wind Farm, sited on the shallow central area of the North Sea known as Dogger Bank, is the largest offshore wind project in RWE's current portfolio. The project is located 195 km off the UK’s North East coast on a site of 593 square kilometres. It has an agreed connection point at an existing National Grid substation in Lackenby, Teesside. Sofia Offshore Wind Farm is one of the four Dogger Bank projects that were awarded consent in 2015. Formerly known as Dogger Bank Teesside B, the entire project was taken over by innogy (now RWE) in August 2017 and subsequently renamed Sofia Offshore Wind Farm.
Offshore construction started in 2023, with export cable installation. In terms of components, the wind farm will comprise 100 turbines, an offshore converter station and hundreds of kilometres of both inter-array and export cables, as well as onshore electrical infrastructure.
