wiredinUSA July 2018

Market conditions forcing change

Wind plans

Photo by Shaun Dakin on Unsplash

Van Oord Offshore Wind BV has awarded Prysmian Group with a contract for the development of a submarine inter-array cable system for Borssele III and IV offshore wind farms. Prysmian will be responsible for the design, manufacture, supply and testing of about 175km of a variety of 66kV three-core cables with XLPE insulation. The wind farms are part of the Borssele Wind Farm Zone, located near the southern border of the Dutch Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) approximately 25km from the shore, andwill have a total installed capacity of 731.5MW. The project will provide sustainable electricity to over 800,000 households in the Netherlands and is part of a wider plan to achieve 16 percent of total generated electricity from renewable energy by 2023. The cables will be produced in Prysmian’s center of excellence in Pikkala, Finland, and are due for delivery in early 2020.

SMS group GmbH has announced reductions in personnel as a result of difficult conditions within the metallurgical plant and machinery construction market. Steel producers remain challenged by over-capacities, leading to continued low investment in new metallurgical plants. This is causing fierce competition and price pressure among plant constructors bidding for individual projects. Due to this situation SMS group is being forced to cut costs by optimizing internal processes and procedures. A reduction in the number of employees is therefore unavoidable. The managing board is currently informing the workforce at the Mönchengladbach, Hilchenbach, Düsseldorf and Witten locations. The company aims to reduce its Germany-based workforce by 570 employees by 2020. the measures are underway with the workers’ representation bodies. As in 2016, the managing board will make every effort, in cooperation with the works councils and labor union, to achieve most of the cutbacks with pre-retirement reductions in hours and individual agreements, but redundancies appear unavoidable. Negotiations on implementing

wiredInUSA - July 2018

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