A Scottish renewables consultancy has won a 12-year construction and operations monitoring contract for a £1.6 billion offshore wind farm.
Sgurr Energy – part of the Wood Group oil and gas services conglomerate – secured the construction and operational monitoring contract for the 396MW Merkur wind farm in the German North Sea, for which the new financing structure was put in place this month.
The scope of the contract includes monitoring of construction works and the financial and operational performance of the project to provide regular reporting to the project lenders throughout construction and for the first 10 years of operation.
The Wood Group subsidiary was appointed as lenders’ technical advisor for a consortium of international lenders in 2015 to support the project to financial close. This construction and operations monitoring appointment will see Sgurr Energy support the £1.6 billion project, developed by Merkur Offshore, until 2028.
Sgurr Energy’s role in this project to date included independent technical due diligence, advising lenders on permitting and environmental considerations, civil and electrical design, project delivery and energy yield predictions.
Offshore construction work will begin early in 2017 and will consist of 66 GE Haliade 6MW wind turbines, which is the first commercial deployment of this technology in Europe and the largest in the world.
Sgurr Energy project manager Kevin Murphy, said: “As the first large scale deployment of the GE Haliade 6MW wind turbine this is a milestone project for the European offshore wind industry.”
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