ICO Wind Farm

International Car Operators (ICO) imports more than 2.5 million cars annually via the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge. These cars include more and more electric models that lose their battery capacity after a few weeks at sea. In order to recharge the cars in a sustainable way before they leave for the showrooms, ICO has built 11 wind turbines of 4 MW each together with energy company Engie and port manager MBZ. The wind turbines supply energy to the largest charging island in Belgium: 154 charging stations, each with two sockets, allow electric vehicles to charge their batteries.

To connect the ICO wind farm to the high-voltage grid, Van den Berg was appointed as the contractor to carry out the work. The route from ICO's new customer cabin to Elia's electricity substation was four kilometres in total, right through the port area and also under the docks, where Elia had already laid sea cables to which Van den Berg could connect the cables. At the same time, a new fibre-optic cable was laid for communication between the wind farm and the Elia substation, an obsolete 11 kV cable that follows part of the route was renewed and part of a 36 kV Elia cable was replaced.

In order to avoid many socket connections, the route was laid with long stretches of cable of 800 metres. This was done using synchronised cable machines that push the cables instead of pulling them. Due to the complexity of the route, pulling with a traditional pulling winch would generate too much tension on the cables, which could damage them. The 'cable pushing technique' minimised these forces.


Van den Berg carried out this work in less than 2.5 months.