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PARIS, March 10 (Reuters) – The engineering, procurement
and construction contract for an undersea cable between Spain
and France across the Bay of Biscay was provisionally awarded to
HKT HV cables and Prysmian Powerlink, French grid operator RTE
said on Friday.
The Inelfe project, a joint venture between Spanish
transmission system operator Red Electrica and French
counterpart RTE, consists of two high-voltage direct current
lines with a capacity of 1 gigawatt (GW) each.
Additionally, the engineering, procurement and construction
contract for converter stations was provisionally awarded to the
Hitachi Energy/Vinci consortium, RTE said.
In the coming weeks, the project will enter into exclusive
negotiations with each of the suppliers, with the aim of signing
the contracts before May 2023, according to RTE.
Construction is expected to start at the end of the summer.
The award of contracts took place following a joint
statement by the French and Spanish regulators, CRE and CNMC,
confirming interest in the project and offering a new cost
assessment amounting to 2.85 billion euros ($3.02 billion).
A risk provision of 250 million euros was added to the cost.
The interconnection was designed to double existing
transmission capacity between the countries and would allow
Spain to feed its renewable energy into a wider European grid,
which has become increasingly more important after Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine unleashed an energy crisis in Europe last
year.
The project raised several disagreements between the
countries, such as who would bear the additional costs of the
interconnection, as well as design issues and disputes on other
topics the bled into the project.
($1 = 0.9440 euros)
(Reporting by Forrest Crellin; Editing by John Stonestreet and
Shounak Dasgupta)
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