NorNed

Two months after it opened, NorNed had earned about €50 million. The owners had projected €64 million for a full year, so the cable was running well ahead of plan almost from the first day, as the NorNed article records. The first commercial transfer took place on 6 May 2008, the day after commercial operations formally began.

The link runs 580 km from Feda, in Kvinesdal on Norway’s south coast, across the North Sea to Eemshaven in Groningen, the whole way as submarine cable. When it was finished it was the longest submarine power cable in the world. Laying the first sections began in early 2006 and the final section went down by the end of 2007.

The purpose was to connect Norway’s hydroelectric capacity to the markets of continental Europe, with the Netherlands as the first stop. Statnett and TenneT own the cable jointly.

NorNed was budgeted at €550 million and came in at €600 million. Hitachi Energy, whose predecessor ABB built the converters and much of the cable, gives the rating as 700 MW at ±450 kV. Losses are about 4.2%, an efficiency of 95.8% over the full distance, and that low loss over distance is one of the arguments for HVDC at sea.

ABB made the converters and part of the cable, and Nexans supplied the rest, per the dataset’s sources. The cable has had two long outages. A fault in 2011 kept it out of operation for seven weeks, and another developed in May 2022, with restoration expected by October that year. The 2022 fault was expected to keep the link out for about five months, a long gap for a cable that had earned its budgeted annual revenue in well under a year at the start.

Eemshaven has since become a junction. The COBRAcable to Denmark starts from the same Dutch port, which means Norwegian and Danish power both land in the same port in the far north of the Netherlands.