Danish Energy Minister Lars Christian Lilleholt and Chairman of Energinet.dk, Kim Andersen, broke ground for the COBRAcable today, thus marking the start of works on the subsea interconnector between Denmark and the Netherlands.
The groundbreaking event took place at the site of Energinet.dk’s high-voltage station in Endrup at Esbjerg.
From 2019 onwards, two parallel 325km long cables will send power back and forth between the two countries. The cables are approximately 13cm thick and can supply up to 700,000 households with electricity.
The COBRAcable will have a capacity of 700MW and will run from Eemshaven in the Netherlands, via the German sector of the North Sea to Endrup in Denmark. The interconnector will make Dutch capacity structurally available to the Danish electricity grid, and vice versa. It will also be designed in such a way as to enable the connection of an offshore wind farm at a later stage.
In Endrup, a converter station of 125 meters in length, 36 meters in width and 21 meters in height will take on the power.
Preparations for the construction of the converter station at Eemshaven have already started. Work on the construction of the cable will start mid-2017.
TenneT and Energinet.dk will also install a fibre-optic data link alongside the COBRAcable interconnector itself, in order to exchange the necessary information about the interconnection.
In the future, the fibre-optic link can also be used to connect offshore wind farms to the telecommunications network as the data cable’s remaining capacity will be made available to the market.