All 54 monopile transition pieces for the Inch Cape Offshore Wind Farm have now been installed, marking another significant advance in the Scottish project's offshore construction.

The achievement follows the installation of all 54 monopiles at the North Sea site around two months ago.

Seaway7's heavy lift crane vessel Seaway Alfa Lift has been shuttling to and from Forth Port's marshalling yard in Leith, loading and fitting six transition pieces on each trip.

Standing 28 metres tall — roughly the height of an eight-storey building — with an outer diameter of 8.3 metres and weighing about 700 tonnes, the transition pieces have been a prominent feature on Edinburgh's skyline for the past six months. They form the stable interface between the project’s monopiles and the turbine towers to be installed above.

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Inch Cape Project Director John Hill said: "Installing all the 54 transition pieces is a major achievement for the Inch Cape team and a terrific step forward for the project. This opens the site for the next campaign of array cable installation and for the start of turbine installation later in the year."

Delivering the transition piece scope involved close collaboration between multiple contractors, including engineering designers SLPE; fabricators CWHI and CFHI; Forth Projects for marshalling at Leith; Global Energy Solutions for completion works; and Seaway7 for installation.

Each transition piece is equipped with a boat landing system, access ladder and external work platform, allowing technicians and engineers to enter the turbine towers for maintenance during operations.

Attention now turns to installing 54 pin piles using a specially designed pile installation frame (pre-piling template), ahead of the project’s 18 jacket foundations. Further offshore activity scheduled this year includes completing burial of the second export cable and starting installation of the first array cables and initial wind turbines.

Inch Cape is owned on a 50/50 basis by ESB (Ireland) and Red Rock Renewables.