Ancora

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Senvion
OEM
Grid Integration & Compliance,Construction Management
Electrical, Civil, Project Management, Communication & SCADA
170 MW
Sept14 - Nov16

Customer & Stakeholders

VENTIVESTE – Consortium led by GALP (34%), Martifer (31%) and Enersis (30 %), EFACEC (2%) and REpower (1%).    

Senvion S.A. (called REpower Systems SE until 2014) was a German wind turbine manufacturer founded in 2001 in Germany, delivering the full EPC supply including over 100 turbines.

Challenge

The consortium won the 2nd phase of the Portuguese Public Government tender, consisting in 400 MW distributed through several wind farms including the creation of clustered production facilities in remote regions. The project consisted as implementation of strategic development for the parties.

The development included permitting, grid access rights for several wind farms. Some areas had challenging environmental requirements including construction constrains for protected species and areas, multiple interfacing and crossing with public infrastructure, etc. Grid access had the challenge of buildling  a 400 kV substation and overhead line for interfacing the TSO the company REN. Additionally, several other substations and overhead lines needed to be built to interconnect the different projects “Sernancelhe” and “3-Marcos”.

The local Senvion team, took responsibility for the majority of BoP works and turbine supply, including contracting and supervision. The local Portuguese Team needed to ramp up and find a solid combination of profils and own personnel to cope with the management of the 4 projects running in parallel and in a tight deadline.

The Plan

The plan consisted in putting together a motivated and experienced team, finalize the detail engineering phase, execute the contracting scope definition with the contractors, start construction works as soon as possible in order to avoid the barrier of works during constrained season in order to comply with regulator deadlines.

Perform all pre-studies necessary to kick start the engineering as well as establish high level coordination with TSO specially in regard to grid performance and integration.

Find and engage experienced site supervision team to cope with high pressure and quality requirements from the customer. A difficult challenge would also be the  safety management, not only during peak work execution but especially before start of each activity. With 4 projects going almost simultaneously in remote and disconnected areas, the amount of documentation (procedures, insurances, safety training, etc) to be verified and checked daily for workers and companies going in and out of the activities was tremendous.

Results

In order to serve project tight schedule construction started soon, however that would create expected contractor bottlenecks regarding availability of workers and machinery tied in other projects. That challenge could be managed and solutions for acceleration were found.

Initially there were a number of delays caused by activities not starting in due time,  documentation submittal and approval process was taking too long and cousing delays. In many cases the worker`s aptitude and registrations could not be verified and it caused construction delays. After a slow start the processes was accelerated and the companies were advised to pre-schedule submittals of documentation and avoid late approval and starts.

The supervision team was very experienced and could coordinate and antecipate  contractor issues, including start of activities and sustain high performance and quality levels. The works could generally be executed in quality, in budget and in time.

Strong push and motivation from the team contributed decisively to accelerate and reduce accumulated delays during the 2 years of construction and challenges.

Finally, and mostly important the customer could successfully celebrate bringing this big project online and profit for the long generating value it creates.