Foundation Installation Start

Offshore foundation installation at the Prinses Amaliawindpark (Princess Amalia / Q7) began on 10 October 2006 with the laying of the first monopile foundation at the wind farm site on Dutch Continental Shelf block Q7, around 23 km off IJmuiden. The works were executed by Van Oord under its EPC scope and continued through to May 2007, by which point all 60 monopile foundations and their transition pieces had been installed. Each monopile is a steel tube approximately 4 m in diameter, 50 m long, weighing about 320 tonnes, driven into the seabed in water depths of 19-24 m. Transition pieces, supplied by Smulders, weigh around 115 tonnes each and were fixed on top of the installed monopiles to provide the interface between the foundation and the turbine. Installation was carried out using the Jumping Jack jack-up vessel: monopiles were initially discharged horizontally and then upended to vertical before being driven into the sea floor. The event marks the start of offshore installation works on the project and is the foundation_installation_start counterpart to the offshore_construction_start milestone already recorded for the same date.