Belgium's First Offshore Windfarm gets Bigger

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland) --The second phase of Belgium's first offshore windfarm at Thornton Bank has been fully commissioned, adding 148-megawatts (MW) of green energy to the country's electricity mix.

Phase II of the windfarm, which uses 24 6.15 MW wind turbines from REpower Systems AG (ETR:RPW) (Hamburg, Germany), brings the capacity of the windfarm to almost 180 MW. Thornton Bank is located around 30 kilometers off the coast of Belgium in waters up to 30 metres deep. Thornton Bank is notable in that it was the first windfarm in the world to start using turbines with a generating capacity in excess of 6 MW. It is also one of the largest project-financed offshore wind farms in Europe, involving eight European commercial banks, and the European Investment Bank (EIB), which provided essential funding of €900 million ($1.28 billion) for Phases II and III of the project. For additional information, see December 2, 2010, article - Belgium's Thornton Bank Windfarm Gets 900 Million-Euro Uplift.

Germany's RWE Innogy, the renewable energy division of RWE AG (PINK:RWEOY) (Essen, Germany), is overseeing Thornton Bank's development and is the largest shareholder with a 26.7% share.

"Construction of Thornton Bank wind farm is on schedule and is matching up to our expectations," stated Dr. Hans Bunting, CEO of RWE Innogy. "This project shows that - when the conditions are right and long-term planning is possible - offshore wind energy can work on an industrial scale."

Work on Phase II began last March when Repower and partner C-Power (Zwijndrecht, Belgium) installed the first of 48 of the 6M turbines. For additional information, see March 27, 2012, article - Belgium Welcomes World's Largest Offshore Wind Turbine.

Work on Phase III of the project got under way towards the end of last year and will be completed later this year, adding another 24 turbines. When completed, Thornton Bank will have a total generating capacity of 325 MW, enough to power approximately 600,000 homes.

According to RWE, the electricity generated by the windfarm reaches the substation at a voltage of 33 kilovolts (kV) where it is converted to a voltage level of 150 kV before being transported via two export cables to the coastal in-feed point at Sas-Slijkens in the West Flanders region and onto the grid.

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