(Oil Price) – The UK’s energy regulator Ofgem on Friday awarded a $2.5 billion (£2 billion) funding package for a subsea and underground cable between Scotland and northern England that would give North Sea wind farms additional access to the grid.
Eastern Green Link 1 (EGL1) will be a high voltage electricity superhighway able to transport 2 gigawatts (GW) of UK wind-generated electricity between Torness, East Lothian and Hawthorn Pit, County Durham. Most of the 196 km (122 miles) cable will be under the North Sea, with the remaining cables underground linking the cable to substations and converter stations in Scotland and England.
“The project will reduce Great Britain’s reliance on volatile international gas markets by further harnessing the power of homegrown North Sea wind,” the regulator said in a statement.
The new project is expected to deliver annual saving of over $1.1 billion (£870 million) by reducing the need to compensate wind generators due to lack of grid capacity. Currently, the system operator has to often compensate UK power generating companies when they are asked to turn off production during times of high wind due to lack of grid capacity.
Eastern Green Link 1 is the second of 26 critical energy projects, worth an estimated $25.3 billion (£20 billion), to successfully complete Ofgem’s new fast track Accelerated Strategic Transmission Investment (ASTI) framework, the regulator said.
The first of these project to reach the milestone was Eastern Green Link 2 (EGL2), a subsea and underground cable project between Scotland and Yorkshire in England that could power up to 2 million British homes. Earlier this year, Ofgem approved a $4.3 billion (£3.4 billion) funding to the EGL2 project.
At the end of last year, National Grid, the UK’s power systems operator, said it is accelerating the connection of up to 20 GW of clean energy projects to its electricity transmission and distribution networks in England and Wales as part of a collaborative UK plan to speed up and reform connections.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
