Dutch shipping company Acta Marine’s Service Operation Vessel Acta Centaurus is to start on its work for the Vattenfall offshore wind farms DanTysk and Sandbank 70 kilometres off Sylt over the next eight months.
Acta centaurus will leave the port of Hamburg today to make its way to the Danish port of Esbjerg. Here she will be mobilised for the next few days. At the beginning of March, she will then begin her offshore wind campaign. Acta Marine was awarded the contract to supply a SOV in 2024, 2025 and 2026 in February 2023.
Acta Centaurus, which is more than 90 metres long, will first work for four months at the Sandbank offshore wind farm and then carry out maintenance work at DanTysk for another four months. The entire service campaign is expected to last until October of this year. At peak times, up to 100 people will be working in shifts to maintain the wind farms over the coming months. The Acta Centaurus will regularly call at Esbjerg every 14 days to load new equipment and change the service teams.
Working in 3 metre waves
The Acta Centaurus is a so-called ‘walk to work vessel’. It has an SMST gangway onboard that is designed in such a way that it can withstand the wave movements of the North Sea in all directions, so that people can safely transfer from the vessel to the wind turbines even when the waves are more than three metres high. The vessel also has an SMST 6t 3D Motion Compensated Crane for heavy cargo.
Wind farms
The DanTysk and Sandbank offshore wind farms are located 70 and 90 kilometres west of the island of Sylt in the North Sea. Together comprising 152 wind turbines, they have a total installed capacity of 576 MW and cover an area of around 150 square kilometres. The annual amount of electricity generated by the two offshore wind farms is equivalent to the annual consumption of around 800,000 average German households. DanTysk and Sandbank are a joint venture between Vattenfall (51%) and Stadtwerke München (49%). DanTysk has been in operation since 2014, Sandbank since 2016. Source: Vattenfall/Acta Marine
