Subsea cable ashore on Harris

Under the sea from Skye, new subsea cable taken ashore on Harris

6 August 2021

A new electricity subsea cable has come ashore on Harris after being laid out across the Minch.

SSE engineers and contractors pulled the connector out of the sea and up the shingle beach at Beacravik today (Friday).

Cable trenching along the seabed route will be undertaken later by a specialist construction support vessel.

The replacement 33,000-volt energy ink stretches from Skye adjacent to the existing broken connector on the seabed.

Specially manufactured in China, the cable took four months to make due to Covid restrictions. It was shipped by freighter to the UK and loaded onto chartered MV Maersk Connector for the Minch job.

The specialist cable layer ship landed the Skye end of the cable ashore on Monday morning following a seabed survey and route clearance.

Crawling westwards at dead slow speed, the cable was carefully eased from the stern of the vessel, arriving at the mouth of Loch Gheocrab last night.

Equipment, a winch and excavators have been stationed at Beacravik since last week to dig up sections of the old cable and heave the replacement ashore.

The link will reconnect Lewis and Harris to the mainland grid after it was catastrophically damaged nearly 11 months ago.

Attached to buoyancy floats, the last stretch of cable was suspended in a semi-circle on the sea surface, guided by boats and divers in the water. A winch and excavators pulled in from the beach.

The cable will be protected in a 217 metre long clip-on cast iron pipe at the tidal and landing area.

Later this month engineers will tie-up the link into local substations.

SSE is confident of having the system energised by the end of the August permitting local wind turbines to produce green electricity again after an 11 month stoppage.

The Stornoway power station will then revert to its back-up role.

Lewis and Harris have been cut off from the national electricity grid since October when a major fault occurred in the existing submarine distribution cable connecting to the Scottish mainland to the only energy link between the locations.

The broken section is about 130 metres deep, mid-way in the Minch - too far down to carry out repairs.

The cable is part of a line that carries power from the National Grid to Stornoway. The entire link comprises an overland cable from Fort Augustus to Skye, the subsea section between Skye and Harris and a further overland section running through Lewis to Stornoway.

MV Maersk Connector at Skye

The cable comes ashore at Beacravik in Harris