IFA2

On 22 January 2021 IFA2 went into live operation, and its opening flow ran from France to the UK. A week later, on the morning of 29 January, it tripped and took 900 MW off the British grid at once; grid-scale batteries responded and limited the fall in frequency. For a new link, that was an early test of how the system copes when a large import disappears without warning.

The route sits well west of the original IFA crossing. On the English side the cable comes ashore at Monks Hill Beach near Lee-on-the-Solent, beside the former Daedalus airfield, and connects to the Chilling 400 kV substation near Warsash in Hampshire. In France it lands east of Merville-Franceville-Plage, near Caen, and runs inland to the Tourbe 400 kV substation in Normandy. The whole link is 204 km long.

The timeline was short by the standards of subsea projects. The European Commission identified IFA2 as key infrastructure in 2015, contracts went to Prysmian for the cable and ABB for the converters in 2017, and the UK converter building was finished in October 2019. The cable was energised for the first time on 15 October 2020, as set out in the IFA-2 article.

IFA2 is a joint venture of National Grid and RTE, the French transmission operator, the same pairing that owns the original IFA. It uses voltage-source converters, which Hitachi Energy supplied, and runs at ±320 kV, a pairing now common on European links of this size (see the HVDC explainer).

The operators give the total route as 204 km, without a separate figure for the seabed section.