The West of Orkney Windfarm project has now completed its 2023 offshore geotechnical and geophysical survey campaigns for the proposed array, located 30 km west of Orkney and 25 km north of the Scottish coast off Sutherland, and has reached a major milestone by submitting comprehensive offshore consent applications to Scotish ministers.
This will support the front-end engineering and design (FEED) of the flagship scheme, which will comprise up to 125 fixed bottom offshore wind turbines.
Last year, the proiect secured the development rights to an area of seabed from Crown Estate Scotland in the highly competitive ScotWind leasing process to bring forward a project which is expected to have a capacity of around 2GW and aims to deliver first power in 2029.
It is being developed by a joint venture comprising Corio Generation, TotalEnergiesand Renewable Infrastructure Development Group (RIDG).
This year’s surveys follow a successful 2022 campaign which saw the completion of nearshore geophysical, offshore geophysical and geotechnical and onshore geotechnical surveys alongside ornithology and marine mammal surveys.
The windfarm is the first ScotWind project to have applied for consent, having achieved this milestone only 20 months after being awarded the site.
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