The Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm is found in the Moray Firth, off the coast of Caithness, Scotland and was developed by SSE and Red Rock Power. It has an installed capacity of 588MW with 84 Siemens 7MW turbines and the site varies between 38m and 55m water depth with challenging glacial ground conditions.

Kent has supported the project through its life from the Beatrice demonstrator, ground investigation planning, structural and geotechnical studies, concept development, FEED and detailed design, and fabrication and installation. Kent is currently working with SSE on life extension activities for the site which include boosting the wind farm power output through a controller update.

A number of possible wind turbine substructure options were considered for FEED, with a four-legged jacket concept with pre-driven piles chosen. Furthermore, the jacket’s primary and secondary steel design as well as the transition piece layout was developed further to allow as much standardisation across the clusters as possible to aid and simplify the fabrication process and realise cost savings for the wind farm developer.

The detailed design was completed in 2017 and involved: