IN Brief:
- NKT has secured a contract worth more than €2.2bn for the 525 kV HVDC cable package on Eastern Green Link 3, its largest single project award to date.
- The cable system forms part of a wider near-£3bn project package that will create a new north-south transmission route between Aberdeenshire and Norfolk.
- With commissioning targeted for the end of 2033, EGL3 is designed to cut grid bottlenecks and move renewable generation more efficiently into southern demand centres.
NKT has signed a firm contract to deliver the high-voltage direct current power cable system for Eastern Green Link 3, the latest major reinforcement in Britain’s transmission build-out and the largest single project award in the cable manufacturer’s history.
The contract, worth more than €2.2bn, covers the design, manufacture, and installation of around 680 km of 525 kV HVDC cable across offshore and onshore sections. The customer is the joint venture between National Grid Electricity Transmission and SSEN Transmission, while the broader project package also includes Hitachi Energy as delivery partner for the converter stations at either end of the route.
Eastern Green Link 3 will connect Longside in Aberdeenshire with Walpole in Norfolk and is designed to transfer up to 2 GW of electricity in either direction, depending on system demand. Across the full project, the link will run for roughly 690 km, including about 580 km offshore, with enough capacity to supply up to two million homes and businesses.
That scale is central to its role in the current grid programme. Britain has added renewable generation faster than the north-south transmission system can absorb it, particularly along the east coast and in Scotland, where wind output can exceed local network capacity. EGL3 is intended to relieve that pressure by creating a long-distance subsea and underground route that can move clean generation directly towards southern demand centres, while reducing the constraint costs that arise when wind farms are curtailed because the network cannot carry the power.
For NKT, the award also lands in a market where manufacturing slots, installation vessels, and specialist HVDC capability are under increasing pressure. The company is expanding its Karlskrona site in Sweden into what it has described as the world’s largest high-voltage offshore cable production facility, and in January it confirmed final contracts for two separate 525 kV HVDC transmission links in Scotland. That combination of backlog growth and factory expansion says as much about the state of the market as it does about one project: grid reinforcement is no longer a side issue to the energy transition. It is the job.
The project remains subject to the development consent process. A planning application is expected in 2026, construction is proposed to start in 2029, and commissioning is targeted for the end of 2033. By then, EGL3 should be judged less by its headline contract value than by whether it helps turn stranded renewable output into usable grid capacity.
