The lease agreements concluded between RWE npower renewables and the Cammell Laird shipyard run for a term of three years.
The leased port area covers around 14 hectares and includes a nearby quay of 230 meters on the western bank of the mouth of the River Mersey.
RWE said it will preassemble the foundations for a total of 160, 3.6 MW wind turbines then load and ship them to the wind farm site in Liverpool Bay around 18 kilometres off the Welsh coast.
Placement of the turbines will be performed from RWE Innogy’s very own installation vessel, the "Friedrich Ernestine".The company said the wind farm, which will have an installed capacity of 576 MW, will come online in 2014.
"The space required to store and preassemble the large-scale components is enormous,” said Martin Skiba, Head of Offshore Wind Power at RWE Innogy.
“With the port area in Birkenhead we have now found an ideal construction site to cope with the complex logistics involved,” Skiba continued. “It will take our offshore installation vessel about six hours to cover the 48 km distance to the construction site out at sea. This fits in excellently with our logistics concepts.”
To build the Gwynt y Môr wind farm, the Friedrich Ernestine will transport up to three so-called monopile foundations plus transition pieces at a time and install them at a water depth of between 12 and 28 metres.
Each of these foundations is between 50 and 70 metres long and weighs up to 700 tonnes. Subsequently, the actual wind power systems will be installed, including tower components, nacelle and rotor star. The installation vessel can transport and install up to six complete sets of turbines of the 3.6 megawatt class at the same time.
RWE Innogy holds a 60 percent stake wind farm, while the municipal utility of Munich and Siemens hold shares of 30 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
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