Energy / ‘Planned outage’ of HVDC cable blamed for wind farm shutdown
A “PLANNED outage” on the Shetland high voltage direct current (HVDC) interconnector cable last week led to the Viking Energy wind farm being offline.
The turbine blades were seen to be still last week, with people commenting online that aviation lights – used to identify 16 of the turbines to low-flying aircraft – were also turned off.
SSEN said that the outage was planned, and that “annual maintenance and inspection works” were taking place on the HVDC link.
“The UK Civil Aviation Authority was notified of the planned outage in advance as per standard operating procedures,” a spokesperson for the energy giant said.
“The link has now re-energised and Viking has returned to full operations.”
Despite this, most of the turbines are standing idle again this morning (Thursday).
The windfarm was also turned off for more than a week in January, with SSEN again citing planned maintenance on the 600MW HVDC cable.
Nine of the wind farm’s 16 battery-powered aviation lights failed during this time as the outage period took longer than planned.
A lack of movement at the wind farm in late April and early May was also been blamed on the Shetland HVDC cable link being taken out of service.
SSEN said the cable, which links Shetland to the mainland energy network, was “temporarily” taken offline between Monday 27 April and Saturday 3 May.
It said this was to enable “inspection and minor maintenance works”.
“While infrequent, our scheduled pre-planned outages are an essential part of inspection and maintenance activities, that are necessary to ensure the continued reliable transportation of clean energy,” SSEN added.
A similar outage in October 2024 was also cited by SSEN as a “pre-planned outage” with the HVDC cable.
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