Louis Dreyfus Armateurs lands $575m Vattenfall SOV deal

Louis Dreyfus Armateurs (LDA) has secured a contract for up to three service operation vessels that will be deployed on offshore wind sites in the German North Sea.

The French family-owned shipowner has emerged as a winner of an SOV tender issued by Sweden’s biggest utility, Vattenfall, for the wind farms DanTysk and Sandbank and the Nordlicht wind farm zone, plus an option for a third vessel.

Vattenfall said it had received six bids or requests to participate in the tender worth €563m ($575m).

The operational wind farms DanTysk and Sandbank, of 288 MW each, share an offshore accommodation platform, located in the midst of DanTysk, and together with the Horns Rev wind farm, achieve great synergies by using the same vessels, infrastructure, and facilities managed from the service port in Esbjerg.

The Nordlicht wind farm zone, located 85 km north of the island of Borkum in the German North Sea, consists of two separate sites – Nordlicht I, with an expected capacity of 980W, and Nordlicht II, with an expected capacity of 630MW. The wind farms are expected to be connected to the German electricity grid sometime in 2027 and 2028, respectively.

LDA currently has two SOVs: the 2019-built Wind of Change and the 2021-built Wind of Hope, delivered into contract for Danish utility Ørsted for the maintenance of offshore wind farms in Germany and the UK, as well as one SOV walk-to-work vessel, the Wind of Pride, acquired in 2019.