Lithuania and Poland mull installing onshore cable for new power link
The Lithuanian and Polish electricity transmission systems operators, Litgrid and PSE, are looking into installing an onshore cable instead of the planned Harmony Link offshore power cable between the two countries.
“One of the alternatives the TSOs are looking into is an onshore cable. According to Litgrid’s initial assessment, this alternative would reduce the project’s budget and allow it to be implemented more quickly,” Litgrid said in a statement.
According to the Lithuanian TSO, an onshore cable would also allow the use of part of the infrastructure of the planned Rail Baltica railway route between Poland and Lithuania.
Nevertheless, Litgrid and PSE are also considering various alternatives to the planned electricity link between Lithuania and Poland, both onshore and offshore. The two companies are reportedly making preliminary assessments, and a decision on the specific route is expected in the first half of 2024.
Such an alternative could allow having a commercially important electricity link put in place earlier than 2030 and it would be much cheaper. However, it would require a political agreement between Vilnius and Warsaw and the approval of the European Commission.
The search for a new solution for Harmony Link is not believed to be linked to an incident in the Baltic Sea in early October when a gas pipeline and a telecommunications cable between Finland and Estonia were damaged.
The search for a cheaper alternative became relevant after contractors’ bids for Harmony Link exceeded the 680 million euros budget planned by the Lithuanian and Polish TSOs. This led to the cancellation of the planned tenders last spring as Litgrid and PSE decided against increasing the project’s budget.
Litgrid CEO Rokas Masiulis earlier told BNS that the Harmony Link HVDC cable would not be completed until the beginning of the next decade after it was initially scheduled to be put in place by 2025 and then delayed until 2027-2028.
Under the contract signed in May 2020, PSE and Litgrid split the work on the project worth around 680 million euros, with Litgrid responsible for the installation of the HVDC cable in the Baltic Sea, and PSE responsible for the construction of the converter stations in Lithuania and Poland.
The Harmony Link offshore power cable between Poland and Lithuania was supposed to be the most expensive and largest project as part of the plan to synchronise the Baltic electricity grids with continental Europe.