Triton Knoll Offshore Wind Farm

Kent were commissioned by a Smulders Sif Steel Foundations Joint Venture to provide design services for the foundations of 90 offshore wind turbine generators (WTGs) and 2 substations for the Triton Knoll Offshore Wind fFarm. The wind farm has installed capacity of 860MW and is populated by 90 MHI Vestas V164-9.5 MW turbines. It is located 32kms off the Lincolnshire coast and sited in an area where we have extensive experience in XL monopile and transition piece design engineering.

The geotechnical design used the PISA Joint Industry Project (JIP) partly sponsored by Innogy (the developer of Triton Knoll Offshore Wind Farm). The results of the JIP research were shared, enabling us to calibrate our state of the art finite difference models of the geotechnical conditions, in order to provide a more realistic, and ultimately less conservative, soil response. This allowed the embedment depths to be reduced by 10’s of metres when compared to the previous code requirements. These are the sort of embedment depths used for the foundations of the first generation, 2MW offshore wind turbines.

For this project, we worked as part of a novel contractual arrangement in which the design and fabrication of the foundations were delivered under a single contract to the client. This differs from previous offshore wind projects where the design and fabrication has more commonly been delivered under separate contracts, or under an EPCI contract where the design was contracted by the installer.