During its month-long work in 2015, the special vessel Topaz Installer laid more than 50 kilometres of HVDC cable NordBalt in the Baltic Sea. At the moment, she is completing a second stretch of the same length.
During its month-long work in 2015, the special vessel Topaz Installer laid more than 50 kilometres of HVDC cable NordBalt in the Baltic Sea. At the moment, she is completing a second stretch of the same length.
There have been three incidents in March and April this year when the the vessels involved in NordBalt works received commands by the Russian navy.
The cable guarding vessels Alcedo and Emanuel were instructed to change their locations for a period of time up to 10 hours, and returned back afterwards. The function of the guard vessels is to guard the cable that has already been laid not properly secured.
The cable laying vessel, Topaz Installer, has been working at a different site at the time. These incidents caused no disruption in the cable laying procedures.
Most of the cable, almost 350km of the 400km under-water cable, has been laid onto the seabed.
NordBalt will be the first power interconnection between Lithuanian and Swedish electric grids. The commissioning of the Lithuanian-Swedish interconnection is scheduled in December 2015. The 453km undersea connection will have a capacity of 700MW. The NordBalt link will join the Baltic Sea region into one infrastructure and will increase the opportunities for the Baltic countries to import Scandinavian electricity by 70 percent.
