Protea’s first service crane already operates on the Thorntonbank offshore wind farm

Protea company from Gdansk won an order for six service cranes for Belgian company C-Power. Recently, the first of them has been installed.

The cranes will work on turbine platforms (towers) at the Thorntonbank – Phase 1 wind farm located off the coast of Belgium, replacing the equipment used there so far, which did not pass the exam in extremely difficult weather conditions.

Protea informed about the installation of the first of the ordered davits on the Thortonbank 1 wind farm on August 11 this year.
The manufacturer emphasized that this is another project completed within the contract deadline, despite the difficult situation in the world due to the pandemic.

It influenced the way the tests were conducted, so that all the people from the client’s supervision and/or certifying institutions did not have to participate physically, on site.

On July 17 this year, the first functional tests of devices transmitted on-line were held in the history of Protea, and possibly one of the first in Poland.

During the transmission of the tests, the service crane with a lifting capacity of 2 T intended for an offshore wind farm, apart from the functional tests, discussions were held with the project manager and the employees of the market development department, who talked about the work on the project and the related difficulties. Below is a video account of the tests:

Earlier, on 26.06.2020, the FAT tests of the service crane for the ThortonBank 1 farm were held.

The cranes, built for the Belgian offshore wind farm ThortonBank 1, were made according to a project developed for a long time, functioning as an internal order of Protea with the number ZW1145.
It is an innovative device, the design of which was co-financed by NCBiR under the “Operational Intelligent Development 2014-2020” program, and which was submitted to the Patent Office in 3Q2018.

It should be remembered that the contract was the culmination of several years of work on conquering a new and very prospective market, i.e. renewable energy sources (RES), or more precisely – wind energy, and the product fits into the company’s strategy to increase the share of sales of equipment on the offshore renewable wind energy market.

rel (Protea)
photo: Protea