Sheringham Shoal includes 88 3.6MW turbines spread over a 35 km2 (14 sq mi) area over 17 km (11 mi) from the coast of North Norfolk. Its onshore bases are its harbour facilities at Wells, its administration base at Egmere and a substation at Cawston.
Scira needed a robust and reliable network to link its offshore substations, admin centre, remote data centres and London energy traders – all in an area with very limited connectivity and bandwidth.
The network had to provide desktop services, as well as carrying critical offshore VHF/UHF communications traffic, CCTV signals, telecoms, weather and energy data.
We provided LAN and WAN infrastructure encompassing both the onshore and the offshore facilities. We also managed BT to install many kilometres of cable across north Norfolk, and to deploy their IP Clear product on schedule.
The network supports an enterprise cloud environment hosted on virtualised servers located at our own data centre and accessed via a corporate Wi-Fi network. It also supports specialised systems such as turbine condition monitoring, bringing in data from sensors on the turbines.
This project involved extensive collaboration with the other parties, placing us in the role of technological and project co-ordinator within a very tight timescale.