Osprey’s cabling service helps schedules accelerate towards net zero
Osprey’s cabling service is well-established to transit cables away from the traditional means and on a budget. But it also has the potential to accelerate project schedules for the installation of offshore wind – even marginal, half-day gains on a project can make a big difference for project managers who are tied to tight timetables.
REACTIVE CAPABILITY IS THE KEY TO ACCELERATION
Plans were announced recently to maximise the renewable energy potential from Seagreen, Scotland’s largest fixed base offshore wind farm. The aim is to increase the potential installed capacity of the project’s remaining 36 turbines from 360MW to up to 500MW. To bring that energy onshore means using high quality cables that don’t lose any of their structural integrity during transit or installation, getting them installed on time and in line with project schedules. Osprey’s cabling team delivers that certainty. Our teams and our equipment are allocated with a guarantee – surety of supply starts as early as possible in the tendering process.
In this instance, it meant the Osprey Intrepid was on her way with equipment from Dutch Offshore Contractors B.V. to Sousaki in Greece, less than 10 days from the award of contract. There, our on-site project managers, and in-house engineers and naval architects supervised loading (and testing) over 70km of cable into two, 2,000te carousels.
Connor Taylor, Project Manager explains the importance of supply surety:
“Everyone who’s working on the project understands the importance of staying on track. We build time risks into every project and, for cabling, of course we always have to factor time for testing in, too. Our Carousels move at up to 12 metres per minute, so we knew it would take just under 7 days to load this length of cable. This put us right on schedule for sailing back to the Port of Blyth, to offload into the secure storage facilities there.”
Unloading at Blyth started as soon as possible. But while the team anticipated a 9-day unload to ensure the integrity of the cables, this was safely accelerated to 8 and a half days.
Neil Schofield, Managing Director, Marine Projects:
“Because we have in-house engineers and project managers working on each project, keeping us on track with written procedures, we can be reactive – we have the experience to recognise how and where a process can be accelerated safely. In some situations, this may only deliver an hour or so back into the timeline, but when it’s half a day, that can make a huge difference for project managers managing multiple contractors.”
