One of Scotland’s most powerful offshore wind farms has connected to the grid for the first time, aiming to produce enough power for half of Scotland’s homes.
Moray West is located 22 km from Helmsdale in Sutherland and 50 km north of Buckie.
Almost a third of its 60 turbines and all the platforms on which the turbines are located have been installed.
The total cost of the project is £2.5 billion. Its developer, Ocean Winds, is based in Madrid and is co-owned by Portuguese and French energy companies.
Its power cable has a drop at Sandend near Portsoy in Aberdeenshire.
It was buried underground for 27 km to a newly built substation near Keith and Moray West, then supplies power to the national grid at nearby Blackhill substation.
Engie, one of the parent companies that has signed a contract with Amazon and Google to supply the energy they need for operations including data centers, helped with the financing.
The project includes the largest turbines ever installed in British waters, each spinning up to 257 m (843 ft) above sea level.
The 17th and 18th turbines are being installed this week as work continues on the Nigg Quay in Easter Ross to install the steel towers. These are 120 m (393 ft) high. The gearbox, or gondola, weighs 700 tons and is located at the top of the tower.
The three blades on each turbine are 108 ms (354 ft) long and are delivered to the Easter Ross assembly yard from Siemens-Games’ Hull factory.
Turbine towers are placed on monopiles or simple steel tubes. Manufactured by Smulders Projects in Wallsend, North Tyneside, they were sunk 30 meters into the seabed with a 60 meter rise to the surface of the North Sea.
Another major part of the project is the seabed cables connecting the turbines to each other and to the Moray coast. These were manufactured in Hartlepool by JDR.
Ocean Winds has published its analysis of the economic impact on Scotland and the UK economy, saying there are more than 80 UK contractors involved in construction and installation.
Developers such as Ocean Winds are under pressure from governments and regulators to encourage procurement in the supply chain close to home.
The Moray East wind farm in the marine area that borders Moray West is estimated to have brought 6,000 worker-years and £550 million of added value to the UK, with Moray West on track to achieve similar figures.
Once the wind farm is operational, there are only 70 maintenance jobs associated with Buckie-based Moray West. Its operation is monitored from Glasgow.
The same number of workers operate from Fraserburgh to service the Moray East Wind Farm, which is already operational.
While Moray East has 100 turbines of 9.5MW, the newer structures installed at Moray West are 14.7MW, so the newer array produces a similar amount of power with 40% fewer turbines to install.
The extent of engineering in the largest turbines now on the market is staggering. These are turbines designed to withstand the worst Scottish sea and weather conditions to harness the power of the wind.
The pressures on such large structures are difficult to understand. The turbines reach higher above sea level than Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. They are twice as tall as Scotland’s tallest free-standing building, the Glasgow Science Center Tower.
Ambitions for the offshore wind sector are also colossal. The Moray West connection is to be followed by a rapidly expanding offshore wind programme. Ocean Winds has the rights to a larger offshore area in the outer Moray Firth that it is working on and then transitioning to floating wind turbines.
But after proper engineering, there are other hurdles.
The industry has been slowed by a sharp rise in finance costs and other cost inflation over the past two years. Bottlenecks in the supply chain include the availability of specialized vessels equipped with large turbine installation cranes.
The one running between Moray West and Nigg in Easter Ross, which carries two turbines each time and takes about a week to install, needs to be booked two to three years in advance.
Acquiring installation suppliers follows years of planning and design, as well as securing a guaranteed minimum price through an auction process managed by energy regulator Ofgem and then gaining approval to connect to the national energy grid.
This network is limited by a lack of capacity to get power from the north of Scotland to the central belt and then to English cities and beyond. Investing in offshore turbines only makes financial sense when there is sufficient cable capacity on cables from the seabed and carried by very tall new pylons.
Developers want to see those who run the grid – SSE, Scottish Power and National Grid plc – win planning battles with surrounding communities to install new high-voltage connections.
They want to end further planning delays, which will require more planner manpower, and uncertainty about connection consents.
Adam Morrison, UK country manager for Ocean Winds and chairman of industry body Scottish Renewables, says offshore wind is increasingly seen as strategically important to the UK, but the auction process, which has driven down prices, has left funding for such companies . “knife-edge” development.
Moray West went ahead but others who were in the same stages of planning stopped. So it calls for more flexibility to allow for rising input costs.
His colleague and project director Pete Geddes comments: “To meet the UK Government’s offshore wind deployment targets, it is vital that policy is stable and supportive to promote investor confidence and thereby avoid the risk of market and regulatory shock” .