A strange vehicle will be driving on the bottom of the harbor in the western port area of the Port of Rotterdam, on a trial basis. It is the Deep Dig-it, an unmanned trencher of 17 meters long and 138,000 kilos clean on the hook.
Deep Dig-it will play an important role in the construction of the new offshore wind farm Hollandse Kust Zuid. The electricity that the wind farm will generate first goes to a large offshore transformer station or the electronic socket at sea.
The Deep Dig-it must lay the cables between the Maasvlakte and the new offshore wind farm Hollandse Kust Zuid at the bottom of the North Sea. Because there is a lot of sailing in the area and the seabed is restless, ten of the total 45 kilometers of cable are dug at a depth of five meters. Deep Dig-it is the only trencher that can carry out such a job.
According to Van Oord and client and electricity network manager Tennet, this machine is ‘the largest and most powerful of its kind’.
Deep Dig-it will take about ten days to build the almost 45 kilometers of quay. A total of four cables go to the sea outlet; two this year and two next year.
Work will start in July.
