Work Partially Resumes at Moray East OWF after Covid-19 Demobilization

Work has partially resumed on the Moray East Offshore Windfarm project in Scotland following the demobilization of the project’s onshore sites announced in March due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Following the updated guidance from the Scottish Government, Public Health Scotland, and Construction Scotland, a limited amount of work has restarted on the Moray East project on May 11, 2020. 

"Work will only go ahead where the guidance can be achieved, and several changes have been made to our sites to ensure the safety of the workforce and the public. Protecting our employees and contractors is paramount and we will continue to review the situation daily," the operators have said. 

The windfarm, 22 km off the Aberdeenshire coast in Scotland, will have an installed generation capacity of 950MW after its completion. It is operated by  EDPR  and ENGIE. The development will consist of 100 offshore wind turbines and three Offshore Substation Platforms (OSPs). The generated power will be transmitted to the grid via three subsea export cable circuits to the landfall location at Inverboyndie bay on the Aberdeenshire coast. The onshore export cables continue underground to the Moray East substation currently under construction near New Deer

"It has become clear that Coronavirus is not temporary and we are now adjusting to a new way of working to ensure this critical infrastructure is ready to support the recovery. Working with our principal contractor, Siemens (SIEMENS.NS), we have undertaken a full assessment of our activities to understand how the project can be progressed under the new health and safety requirements for Coronavirus," a statement on the project's website issued this week reads.

As part of the project development, Siemens was in late 2018 awarded a contract to provide all necessary components, such as the offshore transformer modules which transform the output of the wind turbines from 66 kilovolts (kV) to the transmission voltage of 220 kV, as well as the onshore station which transforms the electricity into 275 kV for feeding it into the transmission grid.

As the lead contractor for onshore transmission infrastructure construction works for the 950MW windfarm, Siemens last year awarded multi-million pound contracts with companies across the UK for the construction of the transmission infrastructure for the Moray East Offshore Windfarm. The companies that won the contracts include Bam Nuttall, I & H Brown, JGC, Technical Services of Thursd, Barrier Architectural, VokerInfra.