Shared Landfall and Cable Route Infrastructure Concept Design Study
Project title: Shared Landfall and Cable Route Infrastructure Concept Design Study
Project location: US
Client: BlueGem Wind – Simply Blue Energy and Total S.A.
Project Summary: OWC’s project team was contracted by NOWRDC to develop a concept design for a proposed shared landfall and onshore cable infrastructure concept with New York area as the reference location. The objective of the project was to develop a conceptual design for landfall and onshore cable infrastructure that could be shared by two or more renewable energy projects (e.g. offshore wind farms) with potentially different developers/operators, evaluate the feasibility in terms of costs, installation, and from industry stakeholders’ perspectives, identify the framework from a contractual interface, permitting, and regulatory perspective, and lastly quantify and assess the benefits and risks / issues.
About the wind farm
A major problem facing offshore wind development and efficiency is cable route and landfall congestion. Large offshore wind (OSW) projects must be connected to the existing onshore main interconnected grid system to export power, but under the current development environment in the US each project is responsible for identifying its own export cable route to point of interconnection. This causes obstacles for developers including:
- Limited number of landfall and onshore route corridors due to coastal communities, existing infrastructure, and environmentally sensitive areas
- Conflict between projects – first projects take the best landfall and onshore route locations which results in increased project costs and schedules for later project developers
- Limited space for onshore cables and cable landfall
- Interactions between OSW project cables and with existing utility cables
- Difficulty and uncertainties associated with cable landfall engineering
- Excessive planning and construction works in sensitive areas
- High capex associated with offshore transmission infrastructure to developers, especially for later projects
Our scope of work
OWC proposed an innovative solution to cable routing obstacles and landfall congestion for developers and other entities involved in delivering OSW energy to the grid: the novel shared landfall and onshore cable infrastructure concept.
OWC engineered the conceptual design while accounting for civil engineering requirements, electrical requirements such as cable ampacity and reliability, O&M, permitting constraints, and footprint constraints. The concept design scope includes:
- Basis of Design
- Construction of offshore and onshore infrastructure
- Offshore and onshore cable routing
- Cable installation
- Cable rating calculations
- Installation methods
- Installation conditions
- Cable models and required current of cables
- Civil and structural engineering of infrastructure
- Operations and maintenance
- Health & Safety plan and risks
Value added
Local expertise with US market knowledge
Innovative team with engineering capabilities across varying disciplines
Specialised offshore and onshore cable experts
Related services
Technical Studies
Cable Consultancy and Engineering
