E-ON Climate & Renewables UK (E-ON) is responsible for construction of the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm off the Sussex coast in southern England. The power cables will be installed under Worthing beach out to the 116 turbines which will generate a total of 400MW.
As part of the project, connections were to be made between the offshore wind farm and the National Grid transmission system through buried offshore and onshore export cables, for HDD which services were required at several at locations.
Visser & Smit Hanab executed a total of eight HDDs at four different locations on the project. This included river crossings (2 X 312m in length), road crossings (2 X 230m in length), railway line crossings (2 X 450m in length) and landfalls (2 X 409m in length).
One of Visser & Smit Hanab's 250 tonne drilling rigs was used for the HDD operations & installation of PE100 SDR 11 ducts of various sizes at all drilling locations. The first of eight HDDs was successfully completed and installed in January 2016 with the final HDD for the landfall being completed in August 2016.
The above clearly demonstrates that the HDD method of installation is a practical and a versatile solution when faced with various crossings along a pipeline route.