Energy / Viking wind farm being switched back on after planned outage
THE VIKING wind farm is set to start generating power again after being switched off for more than a week.
This was due to a planned maintenance outage of the 600MW HVDC cable to the Scottish mainland.
Nine of the wind farm’s 16 battery-powered aviation lights failed during this time as the outage period took longer than planned.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority has been notified of the failure.
Shetland News was contacted several times during the course of the outage by people voicing concern that the turbines appeared “frozen” and were not rotating with the wind, putting them at risk of damage.
Wind farm operator SSE Renewables would only say that the turbines were standing still due to the planned outage.
“Viking wind farm has been unavailable for power generation to coincide with a planned outage for maintenance purposes on the Shetland HVDC link and is scheduled to return to full operations later this week,” a spokesperson told Shetland News.
But in a more detailed response to the council’s planning department SSE Renewables confirmed the lighting failure.
They said: “A small proportion, 16 out of our 103 turbines on site, require aviation lighting and seven of these lighting units are currently operating as normal.
“Power is being restored to the remaining lighting units as the wind farm returns to service on a phased basis ahead of planned full generation availability resuming later this week.
“The UK Civil Aviation Authority has been notified of the aviation lighting failures as per standard operating procedures and we are working with our turbine contractor Vestas to review our back up power generation options on site should any future extended outages occur.”
Frank Hay, the chair of anti-Viking campaign group Sustainable Shetland, said that in his mind the 103-turbine wind farm is experiencing more problems than SSE Renewables is prepared to admit.
“There seems to be a very high number of planned outages for a wind farm that has been operating for less than six months,” he said.
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