Visser & Smit Marine Contracting

Visser & Smit Marine Contracting, a partner of Global Marine Systems and subsidiary of Visser & Smit Hanab, was responsible for the onshore cabling works on the BritNed interconnector. Under subcontract within ABB’s overall cable EPC scope, the company installed the land cable sections that connect the submarine HVDC cables to the converter stations on both the Dutch and UK sides. On the Netherlands side at Maasvlakte, related works by the Visser & Smit Hanab group included engineering the landfall, drilling PE dune and beach crossings using horizontal directional drilling, extending ducts offshore, pulling in the twin HVDC cables from the cable‑lay vessel via a separation pontoon into joint bays onshore, and burying the cables in the shallow‑water section. Visser & Smit Marine Contracting’s scope therefore covered trenching, pulling, jointing and completion of the approximately 18 km of twin onshore HVDC cable (9 km route length with two parallel cables) that link the sea‑land transition to the converter stations.