Eastern Green Link 2

Sandford Bay, just south of Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, is where Eastern Green Link 2 enters the sea. The cable then runs 436 km down the North Sea, about 150 km in Scottish waters and 286 km in English waters, before coming ashore at Fraisthorpe Sands, south of Bridlington in the East Riding of Yorkshire. An onshore cable takes it on to Drax, the site of Britain’s largest power station, where it joins the grid. The whole route is 505 km.

The marine licences came in 2023, from Marine Scotland in May and the Marine Management Organisation in July. Ofgem gave its final approvals in August 2024, and construction began the following month. The project is a joint venture between SSEN Transmission, which owns the grid in the north of Scotland, and National Grid. The Eastern Green Links article on Wikipedia names Prysmian, Hitachi Energy and BAM as the main contractors, and gives the same ±525 kV voltage-source design as its sister project.

The purpose is capacity from north to south. At 2,000 MW, EGL2 adds as much as Eastern Green Link 1, but it starts much further north, in Aberdeenshire, and ends deeper into England. Wikipedia says the link is meant to “alleviate existing and future constraints on the electricity transmission network”.

The cost figure depends on the date. Wikipedia gives a budget of £4.3 billion; Energy Voice reported that Ofgem approved £3.4 billion. The reports do not make clear what each figure covers, and the final outturn will be known only at completion.

Marine works were planned from mid-2026, and the target for energisation is 2029. EGL2 will not be the last: in December 2025 Ofgem approved two further links, EGL3 and EGL4, targeted for 2033 and 2034. The west-coast precedent for all of them is the Western HVDC Link, in service since 2018.