Van Oord successfully laid TenneT’s first sea cable for TenneT’s ‘Dutch Offshore Grid’ five metres below the Maas Entrance seabed. The hydraulic engineer had developed the remote-controlled underwater trencher ‘Deep Dig-It’ especially for the project.

For the challenging crossing, the Port Authority had to close the 830-metre wide Maasgeul to ships whose draught was greater than 14.3 metres for several hours. This was done immediately after the arrival of the Pioneering Spirit in Rotterdam.

The crossing marks a successful start of construction work for the offshore part of the ‘Dutch Offshore Grid’. The remaining stretch of cable -some 42 kilometres in total- will be laid over the next few weeks.