Despite being designated as an offshore wind turbine maintenance vessel, the NG-5500 jack-up vessel design from GustoMSC shows it is still capable of performing turbine and foundation installation work.
The offshore wind market has seen two GustoMSC NG-5500 design delivered, Seajacks’ NG-5500C Zaratan and DEME’s NG-5500X Apollo. Both vessels have been active in Asia-Pacific for several years. Zaratan has since 2019 worked with turbine installation at Formosa 1 Phase 2 in Taiwan, foundation installation at Akita Noshiro Ports in Japan, and is committed to turbine installation at the Yunlin project in Taiwan soon. Apollo has for the past two years been busy in China and now due for work with pin piling in Taiwan.
Asia-Pacific is currently oversupplied with offshore wind turbine installation vessels and the visible pipeline of projects does not indicate any threat of supply squeeze in the foreseeable future. Installation of heavy foundations, on the other hand, can become a concern. In this regard, the versatility of the NG-5500 jack-up design could help covering potential gaps in vessel availability in Asia-Pacific.
