Iberdola is approaching a milestone in the manufacture of the Baltic Eagle offshore wind farm

The Iberdrola The group continues to make progress in the construction of the Baltic Eagle offshore wind farm, the second major site for this technology that the company is developing in the Baltic Sea in Germany.

The project is reaching a new milestone as Windar has completed 90% of the manufacturing work for the 50 transitional parts of the wind farm, which will connect the wind turbine towers to the foundations.

These works, carried out at the Windar facilities in Avilés, will represent 1.3 million hours of work, the equivalent of 800 jobs. Some 30 suppliers of the Asturian company in Spain take part in the process, including companies producing steel, components, equipment, testing and auxiliary machinery.

Production of these pieces – each of which is 15 meters high, 6.5 meters in diameter and weighs 240 tons – will continue until the end of this year.

Windar will also be responsible for supplying the transition pieces for the Vineyard Wind 1 offshore wind farm that Iberdrola is developing in the United States off the coast of Massachusetts, which, with 800 MW of power, will be the first full-scale installation commercial of its kind in the country.

The Asturian company also manufactured the piles for the Saint-Brieuc wind farm (500 MW) – the Iberdrola group’s first large offshore wind farm in France – under the contract awarded to the Navantia-Windar consortium for the development of this project that has created more than 1,000 direct jobs in Avilés and Fene.

These awards are in addition to the framework contract concluded between Iberdrola and Navantia-Windar for the manufacture and supply of 130 XXL monopiles. In total, Iberdrola has so far awarded contracts worth more than €1 billion to this consortium, including orders already completed for East Anglia One in the UK and Wikinger in the Baltic Sea.

With a capacity of 476 MW, Baltic Eagle will have 50 wind turbines with a unit capacity of 9.53 MW on monopiles, for an annual production of 1.9 TWh, enough to sustainably meet the demand of 475,000 households and avoid the emission of nearly one million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.

Baltic Eagle represents the second major offshore wind initiative promoted by the Iberdrola Group in Germany, after the commissioning of the Wikinger offshore wind farm (350 MW) at the end of 2017. The company is also developing another offshore installation in Germany: Windanker (300 MW) .

These three renewable installations, located next to the island of Rügen, will give rise to the largest offshore wind complex in the Baltic Sea, with a total installed capacity of 1,100 MW and a combined investment of around 3.5 billion euros. euros.

Baltic Eagle and Wikinger, with a combined capacity of 826 MW, will become the heart of the Baltic Sea Hub, a renewable hub in the Baltic Sea that will serve as an epicenter for offshore and onshore wind services. They will be able to produce enough energy to cover 45% of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s total electricity consumption and will save 1.65 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

Just as the Iberdrola Group pioneered the development of onshore wind more than two decades ago, today the company is leading the development of offshore wind, one of the keys to growth of the company, in which she began her involvement 15 years ago.

Thus, of the 7,000 MW of wind power currently under construction or secured with PPAs, more than 5,500 MW (78.5%) correspond to offshore projects. Iberdrola already has three large offshore complexes in operation: East Anglia ONE and West of Duddon Sands in the UK (over 1,100 MW together) and Wikinger (350 MW) in Germany.