Wind Energy

Exciting moments: hauling the star of rotor blades.
Lift 1, as well as an accommodation/transformer platform for the Bard
Offshore 1 wind farm. In August, the first five-MW turbine was installed
close to the dyke at Wilhelmshaven. In May 2009, Bard announced that
following the five-MW turbine, a 6.5-MW turbine is now being planned.
In June, the transformer platform was set up in the North Sea and the
Wind Lift 1 installation vessel was launched from the Lithuanian shipyard.
“The wind farm will be ready by the end of 2010,” confidently
asserts Anton Baraev, head of Bard Engineering. Bard is planning
wind farms in Europe with a total capacity of up to 3,000 megawatts.
The company employs nearly 1,000 people in northwestern Germany.
Despite this diversity, the offshore manufacturing scene is still relatively
uncluttered. Around 160 wind farms are currently
at various stages of planning in Europe, and there is
much greater variety among investors than among
manufacturers. Other energy companies in addition to
Airtricity, Bard, Blackstone, Enertrag and wpd, energy
utilities are now also planning projects worth hundreds
of millions of euros; RWE, E.ON and EnBW from Germany,
Vattenfall from Sweden, Dong from Denmark and EDF
from France are particularly active. Essent and Nuon in
the Netherlands have now been taken over by RWE and
Vattenfall respectively. Even Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s global cooperative
platform for sustainability, is involved in the London Array project
which is currently the world’s largest planned offshore wind farm.
Large companies like these are not only used to investing money in
the orders of magnitude required offshore in connection with their fossil
fuel power station projects, they are also the ones who, because of
high profits in the energy market and the securities that are available,
have the least worries regarding the financial crisis; following the credit
crunch the banks have tightened their requirements for the equity ratio
from the expected 30 percent to as much as 50 percent at the present
time, while interest rates have also gone up.
“Like winning the lottery”
OffshOre #2 | The Magazine
The wide variety of offshore countries, manufacturers
and investors means that a flood of demand is predicted for
which suppliers are now preparing themselves. The fact that
the European governments’ targets far exceed manufacturers’
capacities also gives manufacturers some certainty.
Take the example of Cuxhaven. Back in 2007, Cuxhaven
Steel Construction (CSC) from the Bard group was set up
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