Innovative Methods of On-Site Wind Installation Construction

July 21, 2011 - PRLog -- Construction IQ: It's clear that the industry is at present experiencing a boom at the moment with a lot of investments being made across the board. Let me ask you, Kaj, just to start us off, what makes offshore wind so special?

K Lindvig: I think when we compare it to the onshore wind where onshore is more the logistic thing and the transport, it’s the wind which is the challenging element. When we then go offshore we have a lot more elements to take care of. We have rain at the sea, we have the current and we have the tide. We, of course, have the same - the wind and wind speed and the wind direction as we have onshore, but we have more elements and we have a lot of combinations of those elements.

Then we definitely also have the challenge of the seabeds. Onshore you have the same, more or less, ground conditions as you have offshore. Offshore you can't see them. You can measure them. And you have to be able to operate on hard seabeds, on clay sand, stones, whatever the seabeds are, and that's also a challenging element to the offshore.

Vessels have to locate from location to location. It's not the same as driving a truck or driving a crane. Now we have ships and vessels which have to do that. And we have cables not dug in the ground where we more or less can see them; now we dig them into the seabed, and the seabed could even be moving due to scour or you have near to sandbanks and seabed conditions which are changing from one time to the other. So that is a lot of different things which are a lot more challenging on the offshore wind.

Construction IQ: With renewable energy seemingly quite near the top of every country's agenda, how can the industry ensure that it stays there?

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The Offshore Wind Farms: Construction & Installation 2011 event will be hosted in London from 13th to 15th September. For more details, please visit the website: www.offshorewindconstruction.com, call freephone: 0800 652 2363 or email: enquire@iqpc.co.uk.