Cable contract for French floater will include world-first permanent monitoring system

Prysmian Group has been awarded a turnkey contract for the cables for a floating offshore windfarm in France and will also supply an innovative monitoring system for the inter-array and export cables for the project.

The €30M (US$34M) contract was awarded for the Provence Grand Large (PGL) project led by EDF Renewables. Under the terms of the contract, the company will supply 3 km of dynamic inter-array cables and 19 km of export cables, in addition to the land cables for a route of 9 km. All of the submarine cables will be produced at Prysmian’s facilities in Drammen in Norway and Vilanova, Spain, with the land cables manufactured at its plant in Gron, France.

Prysmian Group sales manager offshore wind Alessandro Panico said, “This is the first turnkey project for a floating windfarm that Prysmian has developed. We will use our dynamic 66-kV submarine cables with EPR insulation.” He noted the project is also the first pre-commercial floating offshore windfarm in the country and the first anywhere to use a permanent monitoring system for the cables.

The PGL project will use a PRY-CAM permanent monitoring system developed in close collaboration with the customer. This will enable all of the inter-array connections to be permanently monitored using partial discharge measurement, distributed temperature sensors and acoustic sensing.

Prysmian Electronics chief executive Roberto Candela said the contract will be the first ever example of a combined, permanent monitoring system for an offshore windfarm. “We have worked in close collaboration with the customer to design a tailor-made monitoring solution that will allow PGL to monitor the cables and guarantee the rating of the transmission system at all times,” he said.

Provence Grand Large will use three 8-MW Siemens Gamesa turbines, a floater developed by SBM Offshore and IFP Energies Nouvelles and will be installed 17 km off Port Saint Louis du Rhône. Commissioning is scheduled in 2021, conditional upon the signing of the contract, which is expected later in 2019.