Cenos floating wind project to perform surveys to revalidate NorthConnect data from 2017

The developers of the 1.4 GW Cenos floating offshore wind project in Scotland are set to run a nearshore survey campaign in March to revalidate data collected in 2017 by NorthConnect, an interconnector project whose infrastructure Cenos planned to use to connect to the grid.

Starting on 11 March, the export cable corridor surveys will be undertaken from the support vessel Seafast Don and are expected to take between three and ten days to complete, depending on weather conditions.

The campaign will comprise mapping the seabed with a multibeam echo sounder (MBES) across a 150-metre-wide corridor that runs from landfall to a 12-nautical-mile (12nm) point offshore and identifying key habitats using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and video surveys to allow a live video feed to the vessel. The latter will be performed at seven 100-metre transects between landfall and 12nm along the route, within a 500-metre corridor.

The Cenos floating wind site is located off Peterhead, some 200 kilometres offshore in the UK Central North Sea.

The 1.4 GW project is being developed by Flotation Energy and Vårgrønn, a joint venture between Plenitude (Eni) and HitecVision, which were awarded a seabed lease for the site in Crown Estate Scotland’s INTOG (Innovation and Targeted Oil & Gas) offshore leasing round in March 2023.

In the project plans, Cenos developers state that the AC power generated by the floating wind farm will be routed to a substation platform and exported to the oil and gas platforms, with the substation also including a converter station to enable DC power to be transported to shore and then fed into the grid.

For the DC connection, Cenos partners have been collaborating with the NorthConnect interconnector project to utilize its DC cable routing and onshore converter station planned for Fourfields near Boddam, which then has an agreed link into the Peterhead substation, which would minimize the need to build additional infrastructure for the Cenos floating wind farm.

NorthConnect is a 1.4 GW subsea interconnector which would link Norway and the UK. Proposed by a joint venture between the Scandinavian companies Lyse, Agder Energi, Hafslund E-Co and Vattenfall, the project was denied a licence by the Norwegian government last year, as reported in March 2023.