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Repair work is underway onshore for one of the Thanet
offshore wind farm's export cables.
A full outage is planned for four weeks across September to October in
order to conduct a full repair. The work is estimated to have cost
the system operator £0.6m to complete.
On the 5th March 2016 one of the two export cables connecting the project
to the onshore grid failed. The cause of the failure was found to be a
short-circuit inside the cable and the automatic system protection isolated
the fault to ensure no other elements were affected.
After investigation, the cable fault was determined to be located onshore,
near a site of special scientific interest.
With the cable system down and only one cable in operation, transmission
availability slipped to 150MW. Thanet OFTO ltd, the system operator, explained
that is level of availability deductions it will incur are minimal due
to the cause being out of its control.
Temporary measures were put in place to facilitate the export of power
generate from the offshore site with minium delay. Following the grant
of consent for land access, full repair is underway.
Vattenfall installed the Thanet
project’s two 26km cables
in 2009 and the project started exporting power to the National Grid in
2010. It is located off the Kent coast and comprises 100 Vestas
V90-3.0 turbines. With an
overall capacity of 300MW, the project generates enough electricity
for approximately 200,000 homes each year.
Back in February 2015, a fault was discovered in the project's other export
cable and as a result, the system operator could only offer 150MW of transmission
capacity. Cable recovery started on the 24th of April and was completed
within two weeks.
For more information, please follow the links provide or
click here to view our interactive
map.
