Estonian TSO chief: Two cables out wouldn't have greatly swayed power supply
The potential outage of both the EstLink 1 and EstLink 2 Finnish-Estonian undersea power cables would not yet have caused serious problems for Estonia's electricity supply, said Kalle Kilk, CEO of the Estonian transmission system operator (TSO) Elering.
Finnish paper Helsingin Sanomat reported that if the Finnish authorities had not stopped the oil tanker Eagle S, which already damaged the EstLink 2 cable, earlier this week, the ship could have also damaged EstLink 1 and the Balticconnector gas pipeline as well.
Maritime law expert Alexander Lott noted that it's entirely plausible that had the Eagle S continued on its course, it could have damaged those two connections as well as any other cables in its path.
"This ship was coming from the direction of St. Petersburg, heading west, dragging an anchor over 100 kilometers behind it," he explained.
"Most of the cables in its path, from EstLink 2 to [telecommunications provider] Elisa cables and the C-Lion1 cable between Finland and Germany, which was damaged in November too – all of them were severed," Lott highlighted.
Even so, Estonia's TSO chief confirmed that the interruption of two external power connections would not have significantly affected the security of Estonia's electricity supply.
"Initially, it wouldn't have meant much of a problem for security of supply," he said. "Our system is designed so that we can manage quite well in the event of failure of two major elements. When EstLink 2 went offline, we still had room for one more element failure. But there are no more reserves after that."
The same principle applies to the Balticconnector gas pipeline.
"A Balticconnector failure isn't too complex for Estonia's security of supply, because we have quite a large and robust connection to Latvia's underground gas storage facility – and there are sufficient gas reserves there," Kilk said. "Then we'd just need to operate more carefully with this one pipeline. If that were also to fail, then things would get more difficult."
Elering is weighing options to bury undersea cables even deeper in areas with heavier ship traffic.
"It's theoretically possible to bury the cables deeper, but it's unfortunately expensive and would very likely limit the cable's capacity," he acknowledged, explaining that diminished cooling would mean the power link could only be used at a lower capacity in the future.
--
Follow ERR News on Facebook and Twitter and never miss an update!
Editor: Merili Nael, Aili Vahtla
