The offshore construction team has installed 45 monopile foundations, 26 inner array grids, and 12 export cables as well as 34 wind turbines in 2023.
According to Skyborn, the preparations for the 2024 installation campaign are well-advanced. Fred. Olsen Windcarrier (FOWIC), in cooperation with Shimizu, will be responsible for the transportation and installation of monopile foundations in 2024.
The 640 MW Yunlin offshore wind farm is being developed by the Yunneng Wind Power consortium which comprises Skyborn Renewables (25 per cent), TotalEnergies (23 per cent), EGCO Group (25 per cent), and a Sojitz Corp-led consortium (27 per cent) which also includes Chugoku Electric Power, Chudenko Corporation, Shikoku Electric Power, and JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy Corporation.
Major offshore construction work on the offshore wind farm started in December 2020 with the installation of the first monopile and the first of the project’s 80 Siemens Gamesa 8 MW wind turbines was installed in April 2021.
The monopile foundations were initially being installed by Sapura Energy Berhad, which issued a contract termination notice to the Yunneng Wind Power consortium at the beginning of last year, citing delays in the project completion from September 2020 to September 2023 as the main reason.
The Malaysian company, for which this was the first contract in the offshore wind sector, also said that it would pursue its claims via the dispute resolution process prescribed in the contract.
Following Sapura leaving the project, the monopile installation work was picked up by the Abu Dhabi-based National Petroleum Construction Company (NPCC) and, around the same time, Yunneng contracted Havfram for Project Management and Owners Engineer Services within the foundation installation package for the Yunlin wind farm.
According to information about the project shared last year, the wind turbine installation campaign was continued by one of Eneti’s Seajacks vessels.
