Siemens has been awarded a major order, worth GBP101 million (EUR120 m), with Lincs Wind Farm Ltd to implement the grid connection for the Lincs offshore wind farm.
As announced in December, Siemens is also supplying 75 of its 3.6 MW wind turbines for the wind farm. Construction is scheduled to start in late summer this year, with first generation planned for 2012.
The 270 MW wind farm will be installed 8 km off the Lincolnshire east coast of the UK. Siemens will supply an offshore substation platform, which will bundle the power generated by the wind turbines before it is transported via high-voltage cable to the mainland, equipped with two 240 MVA 33/132kV transformers as well as 132 kV high-voltage and 33 kV medium-voltage switchgear. The necessary protection and instrumentation and control equipment will also be installed on the platform. Siemens will also prepare the requisite design studies for all the wind farm’s electrical components and the grid studies to provide evidence of fulfillment with grid connection requirements.
The grid feed-in point is located at the Walpole 400 kV substation near King’s Lynn, Norfolk. An onshore substation will also be supplied, equipped with two 300 MVA power transformers (400/132/13.9 kV), Siemens will install two filters, 132 kV and 400 kV switchgear, and a reactive-power compensation system in order to meet the requirements of the UK power supply network (grid feed-in code) regarding power quality.
Siemens will employ its new SVC Plus system for this function. SVC Plus operates with a voltage-sourced converter and can be continuously controlled by IGBTs (insulated–gate bipolar transistors). The central feature of SVC Plus, a refined statcom (static synchronous compensator) is its modular multilevel converter technology. By contrast with self-commutated converter topologies in general, the voltage waveshape produced is close to sinusoidal by virtue of the multilevel technology. This makes existing low-frequency harmonic filters unnecessary, and significantly reduces the space requirements for the overall system.
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