A new strange ship, named ‘Brave Tern’, is in operation. This ship is a wind turbine installation vessel carrying turbines for the Block Island Wind Farm, standing on four legs that will allow it to raise generators into position.
This wind farm is the first offshore facility of its kind in the United States. It is located near Block Island, R.I.. It is expected to generate 90 percent of the power consumed on Block Island. The ship is built by Deepwater Wind and with construction by GE. Its generators will produce 125,000 megawatt-hours of electricity.
For the generators to function, the 132-meter-long, 39-meter-wide vessel needs to bring the turbine nacelles and attached blades to the wind farm.
A nacelle is the box that houses the wind turbine’s power-generating components. The nacelles aboard the Brave Tern were manufactured by GE Renewable Energy in Saint-Nazaire and can produce 6 megawatts each. They are as large as a school bus and weigh as much as 400 tons. They will sit some 330 feet (100 meters) above the waves—as high as the Statue of Liberty—when they are installed atop the wind turbine towers.
How the nacelles get up there is another engineering marvel. That’s because once on Block Island, the Brave Tern will become a real-life Transformer robot, changing from a ship into an at-sea construction platform. The four massive legs will drop down through its deck to the seabed, jacking up the entire ship high over the waves. Then, an 800-ton crane will position the generating equipment on the towers and fasten the blades onto the structure over several intense weeks of installation.
If everything goes as planned, the project will be in service by the end of the year, generating 125,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. That’s enough to meet 90 percent of Block Island’s power needs and even supply surplus electricity to the mainland via undersea cable.
It will take the Brave Tern about two weeks to sail the roughly 3,300 miles to reach its destination. The exact length of the voyage depends on the weather. Even in the summer, the Atlantic can produce 18-foot waves.
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Source: GE Reports
