Heavy plate from Dillinger for the offshore wind farm Hornsea One

With 1.2 GW, the British offshore wind farm is the world’s biggest offshore wind farm and the first to have more than 1 GW of capacity. The site is located around 120 km (75 miles) off England’s Yorkshire coast in the North Sea, further off shore than any other wind farm completed to date. The farm spans an area of 407 km², that’s bigger than the Maldives or Malta. It will generate enough wind power annually to supply over one million households in the UK with green electricity.

Steel giants

The 174 7-megawatt wind turbines rise some 190 m into the sky, with a rotor diameter of 154 m, so that the 75 m long rotor blades, by their rotation, cover an area larger than the observation wheel of the London Eye. They stand in water depths of 30 to 40 m on monopile foundations with diameters of up to 8.1 m and a weight of approximately 900 t each.

For these monopile foundations, Dillinger supplied around 99,000 t of thermo-mechanically rolled heavy plate in thicknesses ranging from 30 to 90 mm.