E.ON officially opened the Kårehamn offshore wind farm near the Swedish island of Öland in the Baltic Sea. The Swedish energy minister Anna-Karin Hatt was present on the occasion. The wind farm had already been connected to the grid a few weeks ago after only 19 months of construction. Kårehamn has a capacity of 48MW and cost EUR 120M to build. The wind farm employs 16 Vestas V112 turbines, each with a capacity of 3MW, to produce enough electricity to power some 28,000 homes.
Kårehamn was built using the MPI Discovery, an ultra-modern installation vessel that E.ON had commissioned especially for its offshore wind farms and has exclusively chartered for the next six years. It has six jack-up legs which lift the whole 140m long and 40m wide vessel out of the water to provide a stable platform from which foundations and wind turbines can be efficiently and safely installed even in rough seas.
E.ON has already invested some EUR 4B in offshore wind in recent years and has already built eight offshore wind farms in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, some in partnership with other companies.
