Italy–Greece HVDC (GRITA)

On 18 May 2021 the only cable between Italy and Greece failed. The allocation office for cross-border capacity, JAO, cut the available capacity to zero and curtailed long-term rights already sold, and JAO’s notices show the outage running well into the summer while crews found further damage caused by third parties. For weeks, Greece and Italy had no direct way to trade electricity.

The link itself dates from 2001. It starts at the converter station at Galatina, in the Salento peninsula of Apulia, runs about 40 km underground to the coast near Otranto, and crosses the Ionian Sea by a 160 km submarine cable. It lands on the Greek coast at Aetos, south of the Albanian border, and continues 110 km as an overhead line to the Arachthos converter station in Epirus. The Wikipedia article on the link gives these sections; other sources give slightly different totals, and this page gives 313 km.

It is a monopole: one 400 kV conductor, with the current returning through the sea. The electrodes sit at each end, a bare copper cathode on the Italian side and an anode in a bay on the Greek side. ABB made the cable. The operators are Terna in Italy and IPTO, the successor to the Greek operator HTSO.

At 500 MW, it is small by current standards, and a single fault removes the whole border.

That is the argument for a second cable. Terna and IPTO have been working on GR.ITA 2, which would land at Melendugno on the Adriatic coast of Apulia and at Thesprotia in Greece, across from the southern tip of Corfu. Balkan Green Energy News reports a subsea section of about 250 km, a 50 km underground AC run to Galatina, and two HVDC cables adding 1 GW, which would take the border to 1.5 GW. The expected cost there is €750 million, and Terna held a public consultation with seven municipalities in the province of Lecce. No construction date has been fixed.