At the end of 2020, Pondera and Rebel completed the financing for the Strekdammen Windpark (WPS) with ABN AMRO. Pondera and Rebel are planning to build two GE wind turbines with a total capacity of 11 MW in the estuary of Eemshaven. With the financial close completed, Pondera and Rebel, in collaboration with various stakeholders, managed to complete this process within a short lead time.
The project team is currently finalising the implementation design and work will start in mid-April 2021.
In the initial articles, we take you through the phase until financial close. This article is about the construction team phase in which WPS worked closely with Balance of Plant (BoP) contractors and the turbine supplier to get all contractual and necessary working drawings ready.
What did the run-up to the financial close look like?
Pondera was involved in this project from an early stage to provide the permits for Yard Energy, the developer at the time.
In March 2020, Pondera and Rebel investigated whether it would make sense to take over the project from Yard Energy. In April 2020, Pondera contacted potential turbine suppliers and BoP contractors, to investigate whether the business case was feasible. In this phase we looked at the working method of an onshore wind farm and the cost variant for the business case. This proved to be feasible, and at the end of April Pondera signed the acquisition of Yard Energy together with Rebel.
In May, the Pondera and Rebel project team was able to start, and a construction team was put together for the project. The partners who participated in the construction team were selected in advance by the project team.
For the choice of these partners, a tender was held for the following items:
Part 1: Tender for wind turbines (WTG)
Part 2: Balance of plant (BoP): the work required to install the turbine, such as connections, roads, cables and pipes.
Due to the minimum available time in this phase, various contractors were invited to submit their quotations for this construction team phase, in which lead time, budget and achieving financial close were the biggest challenges. For this, the contractors had to stick to the indicated budget and the end date (September). This is an exceptionally short period for such a challenging project. The final choice was ultimately made to the contractors VolkerWind and Alsema. Both parties have construction experience and are known in Eemshaven. The construction team process could therefore start at the beginning of June.
The process of choosing a turbine supplier had a longer lead time. GE joined as a turbine supplier in mid-July. GE is an important source of information for processing the final design of the BoP.
During this time, in the lead up to the contracts of the WTG supplier and the BoP contractors being signed, a great deal of work was progressed. In this period there was a lot of consultation about the principles of the technology, interface between the various stakeholders and mutual cooperation. In addition, the designs for the wind farm were developed into a definitive design.
Because many different parties were involved in this project and many projects ran parallel to each other, it was important to ensure that the communication between the different parties ran as smoothly as possible. In this way, the project could be completed within a short period of time.
On 30th September, we signed the contracts with contractors KWS and Alsema and turbine supplier GE. We then reached an agreement with ABN AMRO for the financing of the wind farm on December 28, 2020. The operational phase of Strekdammen Windpark will commence in mid-2021.
In the following articles, we will go into more detail about the contracting of the project and the construction process of Strekdammen Windpark.