ESSEN, Germany, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- A renewable energy company said Tuesday it has started laying the cables needed to connect an offshore wind farm to the electric grid in Germany.
RWE Innogy said it started laying cables near the construction area of its Nordsee Ost wind farm off the German coast. The company said nearly 40 miles of cable will connect the 48 wind turbines to an offshore substation by the middle of next year.
"All 48 wind turbines of the Nordsee Ost wind farm will be connected via the so-called inter-array cables and then to an offshore transformer substation – the wind farm's nerve center," the company explained Tuesday. "This is where the 33 kilovolts of power generated by the wind turbines is converted into a transmission voltage of 155 kV."
RWE said the wind farm would be able to meet the energy demands of more than 300,000 German households once completed. It offered no timeline, however, for formal commissioning.
The company said Nordsee Ost is one of the largest commercial wind farms under construction off the German coast.
