Sockets - a photo on Flickriver

Sockets

            We can't do without it any more. Electricity is essential to our economy, society and to our personal lives. We need it at home and at work. More and more applications depend on electricity. Think of central heating, cars and now also trucks and large industrial production processes, such as at Tata Steel, Yarra and Dow Chemical.

TenneT has the task of installing an electricity grid at sea. This way, offshore wind farms can be connected to the onshore electricity grid. Onshore houses the greatest demand for electricity. If each wind farm had to design and construct its own export connection, it would be very expensive. The export cable determines roughly 40% of the business case of a wind farm. That is why the Dutch have a system that standardizes and coordinates this. Until 2030, TenneT will build eight identical platforms and position them offshore. These are the “sockets” for the offshore wind farms.

Hollandse Kust south
TenneT is currently installing 2 sockets for the Hollandse Kust Zuid (HKZ) wind energy zone. HKZ Alpha and Beta. Together they will provide the offshore connection for Vattenfall's 1.5 GW wind farm from the end of 2022.

Collision with Beta
On Monday, January 31 2022, storm Corrie caused an empty bulk carrier of 200+ meters to drift. After a collision with another vessel  it drifted through the construction zone of HKZ. It just missed Alpha and later collided with the chassis or support jacket of the platform Beta. This has caused damage, but not to the extent that the jacket had to be replaced or had to be repaired onshore.

Topside
On December 27, 2021, the superstructure, also called topside, was placed on the jacket. TenneT is now carrying out the final installation work. In order to do this quickly and efficiently, the employees do not sail back to land every day. A working/hotel platform has been placed next to Beta. In this case, the Seafox 7. This is a four-legged, self-lifting large ship without propulsion. The ship offers space for accommodation, construction work and maintenance. It’s specifically designed to withstand harsh offshore environments and conditions, it can operate all year round in water depths up to 40m. The Seafox 7 offers permanent accommodation to 113 persons on board (POB).

Getting bigger
The topside of Beta is roughly 30 meters high, 60 meters long and 35 meters wide. In short: it is not a small object. In the future, the sockets will become larger. Because the wind farms further out to sea will become a bit larger and, due to the longer distance to land, require a different connection technology. Those platforms then become 5 football fields in size. In any case, so large that, despite a lens of 16 mm, you can no longer easily get this in one photo from so close.

Technical Stuff
This is a single non-HDR photo. The EV range of the Canon R6 is such that one in many cases doesn’t multiple shots. And that's a very nice feature when you're on board a moving ship. This shot was taken at: 250ISO, f8.0, -2/3EV, 1/250 and at 29 mils.
Post-production was done with Lightroom. Mainly balancing the (back) lighting conditions. Finally, I added the copyright signs (in Photoshop). The latter is, alas, there to stay due to the frequent copying of my photos. So, don't bother commenting on that.

   

Taken in: Holland / South Holland / Katwijk aan Zee (show map)

Taken on: May 19, 2022

Tags:

Sockets

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Canon

16-24mm

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