The wind park

Location

The Hollandse Kust Noord wind park is located around 18.5 km off the coast of the province of North Holland, off Egmond aan Zee. The wind park consists of 69 wind turbines, each with a capacity of 11 MW. Most of these turbines are more than 1 km apart. The power cable connecting the wind park to the 'power socket' at sea was laid by grid operator TenneT.

Powerful wind turbines

The Dutch government has determined that Hollandse Kust Noord should have a maximum of 100 wind turbines with a maximum tip height of 251 metres above sea level and a minimum capacity of 6MW.  By opting for larger, powerful wind turbines, fewer need to be installed; 69 turbines in the case of Hollandse Kust Noord. This will increase the efficiency of the wind park and reduce costs and impacts on nature.  The wind park has been operational since December 2023. With the completion of Hollandse Kust Noord, the Netherlands achieved its target of over 4.5 GW of wind at sea before the end of 2023.

Timeline

July, 2020

Permits received

Wind park developers need a licence to build and operate a wind park. We obtained this when we won the tender for Hollandse Kust Noord on 30 July 2020.

October, 2022

Construction work started

On 17 October, we placed the first monopile. This is the foundation of a wind turbine. Construction of the wind park thus started.

February, 2023

Installation of monopiles completed

On Wednesday 8 February, Van Oord installed the last of all 70 monopiles. This made the contours of the wind park visible.

June, 2023

First wind energy to the mainland

Before the summer in 2023, the first wind turbines were connected to TenneT's offshore socket. The first wind power went to the mainland.

December, 2023

Construction work completed

Construction work has been completed by December 2023.

Frequently asked questions

Is the wind farm visible from the coast?

Visibility of the wind farm from the coast depends on the circumstances. These include weather conditions such as fog or a clear day. But the time of day and the season also play a role in visibility.

Will the wind turbines be located in the wind farm according to a specific layout?

When a wind turbine extracts energy from the wind, it leaves a wake of lower wind speeds. This reduces the power of all other wind turbines. In other words: wind turbines capture each other's wind. This is known as the 'wake effect'. To a certain extent, we are already minimising this effect through the layout of the wind turbines in the wind farm.

An innovative solution is to control the wind turbines in a smart way by giving them a yaw error for certain wind directions. This slightly reduces the power of a single wind turbine, but a yawed rotor also pushes the wake away from the wind turbines that are downwind; this results in a higher total capacity. Together with TU Delft and its partners, we are looking at smart control technology based on real-time data to reduce the wake effect across the entire wind farm. This is one of the innovation projects that CrossWind is carrying out.

Where do the various materials come from?

An offshore wind farm basically consists of five parts:

1. Sea cables that connect the wind turbines to each other and to TenneT's high-voltage grid. The Twentse Kabel Fabriek (TKF), based in Lochem, is supplying the sea cables for Hollandse Kust Noord.

2. The foundations of the wind turbines, which are anchored in the seabed. These foundations, also known as monopiles, consist of steel plates that have been rolled and welded together by Sif in Roermond and at the Maasvlakte in Rotterdam. In addition to the monopiles, other steel structures are also needed on the foundations to make them accessible for maintenance of the wind turbines. These constructions are made by Amicon in Sneek and Marketex in Estonia.

3. The grey-white towers that stand on the foundations and support the wind turbines are also made of welded steel plates. These towers are manufactured in Denmark by Welcon, a sub-supplier of Siemens Gamesa Renewables.

The nacelles are supplied by Siemens Gamesa Renewables. These nacelles are made of various materials that are brought from all over the world to Cuxhaven in Germany for assembly of the nacelle there.

4. The blades of the wind turbine are mainly made of fiberglass, balsa wood and epoxy, which as a whole is strong enough to transfer the wind forces to the nacelle. These blades are produced by Siemens Gamesa Renewables in Aalborg, Denmark.