Tarchon Interconnector

Somewhere between Clacton-on-Sea and Harwich, on the Tendring peninsula in Essex, Tarchon’s cable is expected to come ashore. The exact landfall is still under investigation, according to the developer’s Section 35 request to the UK government of February 2025. From the coast, an HVDC land cable of up to about 18 km would reach a converter station, and a short AC connection of no more than about 5 km would join the grid at the East Anglia Connection Node.

At sea, the plan has about 140 km of cable in UK waters to the median line, then sections through Dutch and German waters before a landfall in Germany. The German connection point is not yet fixed; it is expected to be in Lower Saxony, and the map marks only that region, not a site. The project is recognised by the European Commission as a Project of Mutual Interest.

The capacity is 1.4 GW, the same as NeuConnect, which will already join the two markets from Kent by 2028. The Section 35 request made the case for a second link on government policy: it cited a UK ambition of at least 18 GW of interconnection against only 8 GW delivered so far, and asked for the project to be treated as nationally significant.

Ownership has been moving. Elia Group and CPP Investments have agreed to buy the project from Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, and Offshore Energy reported that the deal was expected to close by the end of 2026. The same report gave 2030 as the earliest start of construction in the UK and 2034 as the target for commercial operation. A summer non-statutory consultation opened on 3 July 2026, with separate pages for the UK, Germany and the Netherlands on the project site.

Almost every engineering detail is open: voltage, converter technology and the German end. The 2026 report gave up to 1.4 GW and about 760 km; this page gives the developer’s own figure of about 750 km. For Tendring, the part that matters first is the land route: up to about 18 km of HVDC cable from the beach to a converter station whose site has not been chosen.