Kergord converter station outage admitted by SSEN
A FAULT at the Kergord energy converter station has resulted in the facility being out of action for a week.
The Viking Energy wind farm is currently offline – though this is down to a “planned outage” of the HVDC link between Shetland and the Scottish mainland, SSEN Transmission said.
The outage was for planned inspection and maintenance purposes, it added.
However, it confirmed that a fault had occurred at the Kergord HVDC converter station last Wednesday and was still being fixed.
“Following initial investigations, work is now underway to complete repairs and restore the transmission network to normal operations as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for the company added.
They said they expected repairs to be completed “in the coming days”.
SSEN also said the HVDC link would return to service early next week after the planned outage.
Frank Hay of campaign group Sustainable Shetland said it was worrying to see issues with the Kergord converter station, less than two years after the Viking wind farm went live.
“Serious problems this early in the life of the converter station don’t auger well for the future reliability of the system,” Hay said.
He said that the aviation lights on the turbines had been seen to be turned off at nights, with one turbine back online at the Mid Kame ridge and moving slowly.
Hay suggested that a generator may have been used to power up the turbine, with its aviation light on last night (Tuesday).
He added that several vehicles were seen driving up to the Upper Kergord site on Tuesday morning, and he suggested that a team from the mainland may have been brought up to Shetland to deal with the Kergord outage.
Turbine blade repairs have also been carried out in previous weeks, with one turbine at Scallafield seen to have workers accessing it via a large cherry-picker.
SSE said only that the work was routine maintenance.
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