Subsea Power Cables
French company Nexans just set a new world record in the subsea power cable industry after installing a 500 kV high-voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea cable at a depth of 2,150 meters (7,000ft) on Italy’s Tyrrhenian Link project.
The installation, completed this week, is the deepest deployment of an HVDC subsea power cable to date.
The cable is 1,000km long and has a capacity of 1GW.
Now, North America to Europe is approx 5,000km by cable path and 3-4,000m by water depth.
Interesting.
If we take the XLPE cable class, you can pus it from 525kV to 800kV without radical material assumptions.
5kA at 800kV is 8GW (using a bipole cable).
If we got good at winding polypole cables, we might be able to create a hexadecapole cable which would be a 64GW cable. 😂
5,000km length is doable here, the practical ceiling is probably somewhere around 8,000km for 800kV.
In terms of depth it’s not hydrostatic pressure that is a constraint it’s the tension during cable laying operations. But a midwater buoy system suspended from the surface would allow you to lay the cable to any depth.
Obviously all of this stuff is a few years away, but why even look at this?
It’s a huge geographical and temporal arbitrage opportunity.
The energy Duck Curves on either side of the Atlantic Ocean are fully out of phase.
This HVDC cable would be equivalent to 64GW of 5hour BESS that could be round tripped twice a day, instead of BESS once per day. So it would operate commercially as 640GWh/day or 230TWh/yr.
That’s around $11bn of revenue, assuming $50 price arbitrage from one solar duck to another.
Probably a bit of a haircut to apply, but who knows? These are napkin figures.
Doing the same thing with BESS is around $80bn if you use BloombergNEF or Ember reference costs.
For context the entire PJM grid is 190GW, this cable corridor would bring 64GW from Europe, with minimal construction permitting or land needs.