© Vattenfall / DanTysk Offshore WindDillinger heavy plate for the
DanTysk offshore wind farm
Green energy from the German North Sea
The farm’s close proximity to the Danish border gave rise to the facility’s name; it consists of the Danish words “Dan” for Danmark and “Tysk” for Tyskland (“Germany” in Danish) and thus underlines the unifying and cross-border nature of this project. Its giant wind turbines are erected on steel foundations in water depths from 21 to 25 m, about 70 km west of the island of Sylt, in the German Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Covering an area of 70 km2 (approximately 7,000 football pitches), it’s one of the first large-scale offshore wind farms ever to be built in the German North Sea.
DanTysk consists of 80 wind towers, each carrying a Siemens SWT 3.6 MW turbine, for a total output of 288 MW. The energy generated is sufficient to provide up to 400,000 homes with environment-friendly electricity and to save some 580,000 t of CO2, an amount equivalent to a 2.7 billion reduction in car kilometers – a distance that is nearly 70 times the equator’s circumference. Thus, the wind farm contributes significantly to the reduction of CO2 emissions and thereby to the German “Energiewende”.
Steel giants
“Almost the size of the Cologne Cathedral (150 m over the North Sea), rotor blades (diameter of 120 m) of “the size of one-and-a-half soccer fields”, foundation piles’ diameter “only half a meter less than the tunnel diameter of the new underground railway line U4 in Hamburg”,… these mostly used comparisons reveal a lot about the magnitude of these facilities.
The dimensions of the monopile foundations are really gigantic: diameter up to 6 m, length up to 65 m and weigth up to 950 t.
For these monopile foundations Dillinger supplied around 65,000 tons of thermo-mechanically rolled heavy plates in thicknesses from 60 to 126 mm.
Transformer substation: Dillinger steel conver
Heavy plates from Dillinger have also been used for the construction of the farm’s transformer substation (1,350 t thermo-mechanically rolled plates in thicknesses from 8 to 65 mm).
Set up in a water depth of 25 m, this substation with a total weight of 3,200 t collects the energy from the wind farm’s 80 turbines, converts it to a higher voltage and sends it to a power transfer station. From there a 205 km long underwater cable carries the electricity to the consumers.
