Green Windpower kicks off the New Year

Green Windpower kicks off the New Year

One of our trenching teams has been busy working at a site in the Cambridgeshire Fens installing underground electricity cables and other utilities connecting up seven new wind turbines which are currently being built.

The turbines tower above the ground at 60m tall and each turbine has 3 blades – each blade being 40m long.  Each turbine should generate 2 megawatts of power when there is sufficient wind with all 7 turbines creating enough electricity to power around 8,000 homes. The turbines cost around £2million each to construct and put in place.

Our role in the project has been to connect the turbines to each other by installing trenches for the cables to lay the underground cables in.  The turbines are all linked into a sophisticated computer system which monitors what they are doing and our teams have also been involved in getting the fibre optic cables installed that carries the data from the turbines.

Our trenchers are able to cut narrow trench widths of around 300mm at a depth of up to 2.5 metres below ground level.  Using a trencher to excavate the trenches is far more cost effective and rapid than using a conventional excavator and our teams are able to backfill with sand marker tile all as part of the same operation when required completing hundreds of metres in a single day.

The turbines are due to be operational later this year and with a total of 15 turbines due to be present at the windfarm by this stage, it looks as if the project should be making this part of the Fens a very green corner of the UK.