The last challenge to laying cable in the wind farm is
the multitude of connections to be made to multiple
windmills. All of these connections can individually
run to shore (expensive) or can be terminated to a
sub-sea sub-station or junction box specifically
designed to combine the power from all generators
and run a single cable to shore for termination.
Connections to the sub-sea sub-station can take place
with existing technologies utilizing wet-mateable
connectors¹. These type connectors are used in the
oil & gas industry. Investigation has indicated that
wet-mateable HV connector designs exist for use in
the subsea industry. This could simplify the cable
handling for installation and future maintenance or
replacement.
For AC power export applications the new XLPE
multi-core cable designs allow the use of a single
cable. Depending on the HV requirements these
cables can be very large in diameter, harder to
handle, higher in cost, have long lead times and
require specialized handling for deployment. An
option to the single multi-core cable is to utilize 3