Emden

converter station Siemens

Converter stations act as power converters

The A-Nord direct current connection runs over 300 kilometers from Emden in Lower Saxony to Osterath in North Rhine-Westphalia. It is part of the first nationwide wind power corridor, which is set to transport electricity from offshore wind farms in the North Sea southwards from 2027. Converter stations will be built at the end points to convert alternating current into direct current and vice versa. According to transmission system operator Amprion, the converter in Emden-Petkum will be one of the most modern of its kind. In addition to converting electricity, it will take over the task of regulating and stabilizing the grid voltage from conventional large-scale power plants.

Existing customer Siemens can rely on high-quality execution

The converter station has a positive and a negative pole, each of which consists of two converters. Each converter is housed in an 18-meter-high converter hall with a floor space of around 5,000 m². The deep foundations for the halls and various operating buildings and technical stations were constructed using 15 to 16-meter-long Fundex piles in various diameters. “The client, Siemens Energy, already knows us from previous projects. In the run-up to the award of the contract for the converter station in Emden, we impressed them with our experience in the manufacture of slim full displacement piles and our excellent technical equipment,” says Thomas Cramer, branch manager of PORR's foundation engineering competence center in Oldenburg.

His team was on familiar ground with this project. Shortly before, they had carried out two pile foundation projects within sight of each other: the first for a railway overpass on the new B210 road and the second for the modernization of the Emden-Borssum substation, where Atlas piles were manufactured with limited height.