The worlds longest subsea electricity cables stretching 450 miles from Norway to Northumberland switched on this month and two parallel cables will carry 700 megawatts increasing to 1,400 megawatts over the next three months. When they reach full capacity they will provide enough electricity to power 1.4 million UK households. This subsea cable should reduce the UK’s carbon emissions and electricity bills as the electricity will be sourced almost entirely from clean hydro-electricity and will sit along side three existing subsea cables which are already plugged into electricity networks in France, Belgium and the Netherlands with another subsea cable already being built to Denmark. The subsea cables allow electricity to be purchased at the lowest price across a vast area and that flexibility will be key in the event the UK is to experience a drop in the amount of electricity being generated by wind like what happened this summer and to make the UK less vulnerable to spikes in the price of gas. 

Closer to home, subsea cables from the Scottish islands to the mainland will play a crucial role in contributing towards the UK and Scotland’s Net Zero targets. Shetland will be linked to the UK electricity transmission network as a result of the 103 wind turbine 443MW Viking on-shore wind farm being developed by SSE Renewables which has a completion date of 2024 and once operational will be the UK’s largest onshore wind farm in terms of annual electricity output. It will also free the way for many smaller renewables projects on Shetland to be developed such as tidal power farms and various community owned wind turbine developments.

In Orkney, OFGEM has approved an extension to Scottish Hydro Electric Transmission’s 220 megawatt subsea cable electricity link which is estimated to cost £260 million and will allow new renewable energy projects on Orkney to send electricity to the UK via a subsea cable to mainland Scotland. The subsea cable is subject to developers on Orkney meeting a number of conditions which includes 135 megawatts of new wind farm projects on Orkney either being awarded a Contract for Difference or being judged likely to be developed by December 2022.