Posted on September 28, 2026
In the spring of 2023, our subsea rock installation vessel Rockpiper had the honor of being the first Boskalis vessel to contribute to the development of the 913 MW Borkum Riffgrund 3 offshore wind farm in the German North Sea. Now, more than three years later, Ørsted’s offshore wind farm has been inaugurated and is operational. This marks the completion of a major offshore project in which we deployed a total of eight vessels and hundreds of colleagues to help advance Germany’s energy transition.
After our Rockpiper completed the pre-lay scour protection campaign, it was our semi-submersible heavy transport vessel Mighty Servant 1 that made its debut on the project. In Singapore, the vessel loaded the 23,550-ton HVDC converter platform DolWin Epsilon for transport to Norway, where the platform – which converts the wind energy into direct current – was ballasted by specialists from our subsidiary SMIT Salvage. A year later, our cable-laying vessel BOKA Ocean installed dozens of inter-array cables, which were then buried at the correct depth by our Ndeavor.
As soon as the bright-yellow DolWin Epsilon platform was commissioned, we sent our powerful oceangoing tug BOKA Sweeper to Norway to tow the platform from the port to the open sea. There, the vessel was assisted by its sister vessel BOKA Keeper for the tow to the Borkum Riffgrund 3 offshore wind farm. Together with the “third sister” BOKA Striker, and our oceangoing tug Princess, Boskalis held the platform in position for its installation on the seabed. This was done by ballasting the platform’s four legs – a task for which our versatile Rockpiper was ideally suited. Using the solid ballast method, a total of 47,500 metric tons of small rocks were pumped into the platform to secure it to the seabed.
