On May 27, the world’s largest offshore converter station, the Heart of the Sea Wind, departed from a port in Nantong City, East China’s Jiangsu Province, for Yangjiang, a city in South China’s Guangdong Province.
The Heart of the Sea Wind departs from Nantong City, Jiangsu Province. [Photo/sasac.gov.cn]
The Heart of the Sea Wind is the world’s first 2,000-megawatt offshore flexible DC converter station operating at ±500 kilovolts.
The 85.5-meter-long, 82.5-meter-wide converter station covers an area equal to a standard soccer field, and stands 44 meters tall. It weighs about 25,000 metric tons.
The converter station can transfer about 6 billion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity annually to a load center, with lower loss and higher efficiency, as the flexible DC transmission it employs can reduce 60 percent of power loss compared with the conventional AC transmission.
It can collect all the power generated by the 163 wind turbines across two offshore wind farms, and complete both voltage boosting and AC-to-DC conversion on site. Despite strict space and weight constraints, it has incorporated electrical, heating, ventilation and firefighting equipment. The coordinated layout significantly reduces project costs while minimizing the sea area required for its deployment.
The converter station is expected to sail for about one week to complete its journey of about 1,090 nautical miles and arrive at China Three Gorges Corporation’s Qingzhou Ⅴ and Ⅶ offshore wind farms in Yangjiang, where it will be installed via a float-over method.
（Executive editor Zuo Shihan）
