After the excursion to Tainan and the shipyard of DEME got canceled due to the typhoon, we got invited to Energy Taiwan. This is a conference about the energy transition and everything that is necessary for it. We got invited by CDWE this is a joint venture between the Belgian DEME and the Taiwanese CSBC.

At the conference, we attended the talk by CDWE, at which they informed us about the current project they are executing, which is named Hailong. This is in the south of Taiwan where they are building a wind farm with 73 turbines which will produce approximately 1Gw of electricity. They were busy with placing the foundation piles from March to July this year and used a specialised template for this in order to make the placing more accurate. Once the foundation piles where installed, they switched the crane head, on their vessel the Green Jade, and started placing the jackets on which the windmills will be placed. These are between 35 and 55 meters high and are placed and shipped in one piece. The production of these jackets happened in South Korea and Taiwan due to a shortage in capacity in Taiwan. The government here is fond of doing things locally, therefore, it needs to be checked if something can be done on the island before it is allowed to be outsourced internationally. These parts are then delivered pre-assembled to the yard in Anping, where they rent four keys. Two for storing the foundation piles and 2 for storing the jackets.

Once all of the jackets are installed, which has started since august, they will be placing the windmills on top of them. Next to the windmills the joint venture is also responsible for installing two offshore substations (OSS). Which have a similar placing strategy as the windmills with one clear distinction which is that the jackets will have four legs instead of three. Once this project is complete the windpark will be the biggest in the Asian Pacific.

There are some challenges in constructing a windpark in the Taiwan straight, such as typhoons and earthquakes. For typhoons it is easy to understand why they can be a problem for installing a windpark. When the wind is too strong, the task of having to ship these high jackets and lifting them will become very dangerous and close to impossible. This is already the case with a wind speed higher than 10 m/s. An earthquake can also be a big disaster, because when installing a jacket the ship has to be attached to it, therefore, when an earthquake happens the ship can shake against the jacket and be damaged or even worse sink to the bottom of the ocean.

One of the advantages this joint venture of CDWE has over others is that it has a ship registered in Taiwan. Meaning that due to the locally first law. This ship always needs to be operational either for their own project or the project of their competitors, which makes it cost-efficient.

Next to the CDWE talk, we were also attending several other stands of interesting companies that were present at the conference. As this was an energy-oriented conference, many companies talked about how they planned on tackling the energy question. There were for example many companies that specialised in the electrical charging of vehicles, and also Volkswagen was there with a specially new designed electric van.

As a group, we also attended the Dutch pavilion, which was a special pavilion for the Dutch Trading office to which we had an excursion earlier this week. At this pavilion, two other Dutch companies were also located, namely Fugro and Boskalis. Both these companies elaborated on how they are helping in the energy transition by building wind parks. At Boskalis they told us that next to all the technical details, it is very important for them to locate their ships at the right positions around the globe, to maintain financially profitable. Fugro provided interesting information on how they can help in building wind farms by deploying special underwater boats with arms that help in building the foundations for windmills. The Trading Office also held an interesting quiz about wind energy production in Taiwan and the Netherlands. This all together provided a very insightful elaboration on how Taiwan plans to tackle the Energy crisis, specifically using wind farms at sea. This is key in their energy transition and minimizing their dependence on other countries. They now rely a lot on Australië for coal but want to be. Be less dependent on others, when times change.