Moray West Wind Farm Connected to Grid for First Time

One of Scotland’s most powerful offshore wind farms has been connected to the grid for the first time and is set to generate enough energy for half of Scotland’s homes.

Moray West is located just 22 km from Helmsdale in Sutherland and 50 km north of Buckie.

Almost a third of the 60 turbines and all platforms on which they are placed have already been installed.

The total cost of the project is estimated at £2.5bn. Ocean Winds, its developer, is based in Madrid and jointly owned by Portuguese and French energy companies.

The power cable is in place at Sandend near Portsoy in Aberdeenshire.

The cable runs 27km underground to a newly constructed substation near Keith, before Moray West transmits power to the National Grid at nearby Blackhillock substation.

The funding was raised by Engie, one of the parent companies, which has agreements with Amazon and Google to supply energy necessary for its operations, including the operation of data centers.

The project will feature the largest turbines ever installed in British waters, each rotating at a height of up to 257m (843ft) above sea level.

The 17th and 18th turbines are being installed this week, while work is underway at the Nigg Quayside site in Easter Ross to assemble the steel towers. They are 120m (393ft) high. The gearbox, or nacelle, weighs 700t and sits at the top of the tower.

The three blades of each turbine are 108ms (354ft) long and are transported from the Siemens-Games factory in Hull to the Easter Ross assembly plant.

The turbine towers are supported on monopiles or single steel tubes. Constructed by Smulders Projects in Wallsend, North Tyneside, they were sunk to 30 metres into the seabed, with a 60-metre rise to the surface of the North Sea.

Another important part of the project is the seabed cables connecting the turbines to each other and to the Moray coast. These were made in Hartlepool by JDR.

Ocean Winds has published an economic impact analysis for Scotland and the UK, revealing that there are more than 80 construction and installation service providers operating in the UK.

Developers like Ocean Winds are under pressure from governments and regulators to increase orders in their supply chain closer to home.

The Moray East wind farm, located offshore from Moray West, is estimated to have generated 6,000 years of work and £550m of added value for the UK, and Moray West is on track to achieve similar figures.

However, since the wind farm came online, only 70 maintenance jobs have been assigned to Moray West, based in Buckie. Its operations are monitored from Glasgow.

The same number of staff work in Fraserburgh, servicing the already operational Moray East Wind Farm.

While Moray East has 100 turbines with a rated output of 9.5MW, the newer designs being installed at Moray West have a rated output of 14.7MW, meaning the newer arrangement produces a similar amount of energy with 40% fewer turbines to be installed.

The scale of engineering behind the largest turbines on the market today is astonishing. They are turbines designed to withstand the worst weather and sea conditions in Scotland, so they can harvest wind energy.

The pressure on such large structures is hard to fathom. The turbines reach higher above sea level than Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. They are twice as tall as Scotland’s tallest freestanding building, the Glasgow Science Centre Tower.

The ambitions of the offshore wind sector are also colossal. The Moray West merger is set to be followed by a rapidly expanding offshore wind programme. Ocean Winds has rights to a larger offshore area in the outer Moray Firth which it is working on, and is then moving on to floating wind turbines.

But even with good engineering, other obstacles arise.

The industry has been pushed back in the past two years by soaring financing costs and inflation in other costs. One bottleneck in the supply chain is the availability of specialist vessels equipped with large cranes to install turbines.

The bus 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 or three years in advance.

Selecting contractors to install it requires years of planning and design, as well as securing a guaranteed reserve price through an auction run by energy regulator Ofgem, and then gaining approval to connect to the national grid.

This network is limited by the inability to transport power from northern Scotland to the central belt and then on to the cities of England and beyond. Only if there is sufficient cable capacity, on seabed cables and carried by very tall new pylons, does investment in offshore turbines make financial sense.

Developers want the entities that control the electricity network, namely SSE, Scottish Power and National Grid plc, to win the planning battle with local communities over the installation of new high-voltage connections.

They want to eliminate planning delays that will require hiring more planners, as well as the uncertainty associated with obtaining connection approvals.

Adam Morrison, UK country director for Ocean Winds and chairman of Scottish Renewables, the industry body, says offshore wind is increasingly seen as strategically important for the UK, but the auction process that has led to the price drop has left the finances of such investments “in a difficult position”.

Moray West has gone ahead, but others at the same planning stage have stalled. So he is calling for more flexibility to allow for rising input costs.

Colleague and project director Pete Geddes notes: “To meet the UK government’s targets for offshore wind deployment, a stable and supportive policy environment is essential to build investor confidence and thereby avoid the risk of market and regulatory shock.”