The Longest Onshore and Subsea Power Cable in the World has been Finished

The world’s longest onshore and subsea power cable, which connects the UK and Denmark, has finished testing and installation.

By the end of this year, the £1.7 billion ($2.15 billion) Viking Link joint venture between the UK’s National Grid and Denmark’s Energinet is expected to be operational.

Prysmian Group, the key contractor located in Italy that designed, produced, and installed the majority of Viking Link, declared today that both its land and subsea power cables had been installed and high-voltage tested. The installation of cables was also done by Copenhagen-based NKT.

The cables were made in the Prysmian Group’s factory in Arco Felice, close to Naples.

In its first-ever offshore campaign, the cable-laying vessel Leonardo da Vinci and the ship Cable Enterprise were both used.

The onshore and subsea high voltage direct current (HVDC) interconnector, which connects Jutland in Denmark with Lincolnshire in the United Kingdom, is 765 kilometers (475 miles) long. The paper-insulated, single-core submarine cables travel through Danish, British, Dutch, and German waters.

Up to 1.4 gigawatts (GW) of sustainable energy can be transferred between the two nations thanks to the HVDC interconnector. That would supply electricity to almost 1.4 million houses in the UK.

On the website for Viking Link, it states: “The cable was tested to 735,000 volts equivalent to 1.4 times its operational voltage of 525,000 volts, which proved the cable terminations, land, and submarine joints.”