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In the Belgian North Sea, maintenance vessels are now able to tether to an automatic cable at a wind farm to get their batteries topped up. The innovative system is the first of its kind and a major step in keeping electric vessels as green as possible.

The charging system was deployed at Belgian's Nobelwind wind farm, which has been in operation since 2017 and features 50 turbines covering 19.8 square km (7.6 square miles) at sea. The facility is the third deployed by the Parkwind company and it supplies power to about 190,000 households.

Nobelwind's new charging station was shipped on a crew transfer vessel (CTV) 47 km (29 miles) offshore and its modular components were raised amongst the sea-based wind turbines using the facility's substation crane. Once it was established, the company successfully used it to charge up one of its CTVs. Parkwind reports that the transfer went off without a hitch, with no disruption to the facility's operation.

As you can see in the following video, which shows the system being tested with a land-based module earlier this year, the entire process is fully automated with no need for crew members to either connect or disconnect the charging tether, an innovation that adds to the system's safety factor.

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