South Korea’s LS Cable & System (LS C&S) has won an order valued at $167 million to supply high-voltage, direct current (HVDC) cables for the Norfolk Boreas Offshore Wind Farm in the U.K.
A press release said the LS C&S order is from Sweden’s Vattenfall AB, which is one of Europe’s largest producers and retailers of electricity and heat. The order calls for 320 kV cables that will lie under the sea. The underground cables will use cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) as an insulating material, which it described as a first.
Per multiple media reports, the Norfolk Boreas offshore cable corridor, using about 96 km, will include export cables to deliver the electricity supplied to the offshore substations to landfall that will be in the Happisburgh village in Norfolk county. The onshore part of the offshore wind farm development will include the installation of underground cables between an onshore substation related to the project and an existing substation of the national grid. The onshore cable corridor is expected to be 63 km.
Located 47 km off the Norfolk coast, Norfolk Boreas is the first of two stages of Vattenfall’s Norfolk Offshore Wind Zone. Per DEME Offshore, which is part of the project consortium with LS C&S, they have also been named a preferred supplier for the second part: the Norfolk Vanguard. Each wind farm will have a capacity of 1.8 GW.
“Only a handful of firms have succeeded in developing XLPE cables defined by easy installation, connection, maintenance and repair,” an LS Cable & System official said. “The cables are increasingly emerging as a mainstream product in the renewable industries of Europe and North America.”