Rovco Wins Survey Contract for Cenos Floating Offshore Wind Farm

Rovco, a global provider of technology-enabled project solutions to the offshore renewable energy sector, has been contracted by Flotation Energy to carry out a geo-environmental survey at its planned Cenos floating offshore windfarm, 200 kilometers off the north-east coast of Scotland.

Located in the Central North Sea, the 1.4 GW Cenos floating wind development will cover approximately 333 km². Rovco, having recently launched a dedicated marine site characterization business line, will deploy its multi-purpose, custom-reconfigured DP2 survey vessel, the Glomar Supporter, to carry out the work.

It is expected that the project will comprise subsea studies of the floating wind turbine generators, mooring line anchor locations, inter-array cables, fixed foundation substation areas, and the portion of export cables that fall within these locations.

Rovco’s scope of work involves the acquisition of geophysical and benthic information to provide detailed data to inform environmental impact assessment (EIA) consents and the engineering processes from engineering to early front-end engineering and design (FEED) study.

The geophysical element of the workscope requires the acquisition of multi-beam echo sounder, side scan sonar, magnetometer, sub-bottom profiler, and multi-channel seismic data along with associated analysis, processing, interpretation, and reporting.

Flotation Energy’s partner on Cenos is Norwegian-offshore wind company, Vårgrønn; a joint venture between energy company Plenitude (Eni) and investor HitecVision. The joint venture secured a lease earlier this year as part of Crown Estate Scotland’s INTOG (Innovation and Targeted Oil & Gas) round.

Craig Davis, Director of Site Characterization for Rovco, said: “We’re extremely pleased to be working with Edinburgh-based Flotation Energy on this project. The company has been a significant contributor towards the building of a strong offshore wind industry in the UK and beyond.

“Our dedicated site characterization division was launched specifically to provide the full range of survey solutions to offshore wind projects such as Cenos, in order to take it from pre-construction to first energy as swiftly, efficiently, and cost effectively as possible. Having access to the full range of tools, equipment, and technology on the Glomar Supporter, along with our highly experienced and specialist team, will be instrumental in helping Flotation Energy meet its timescale for this project utilising a local supply chain partner.”