Nexans Completes Cable Tests for Orkney’s First Mainland Link
Nexans has finished factory testing of the subsea cable for the Orkney Link, the first direct electricity connection between the Orkney Islands and the Scottish mainland, clearing the way for onshore installation work already under way to continue while offshore cable-laying is prepared for 2027. The project, built by grid operator SSEN Transmission, will carry up to 220 MW over a 220 kV circuit running roughly 14 kilometres underground across Orkney and 53 kilometres under the sea to Caithness.
Ending years of curtailment on Orkney
Orkney has some of the UK’s best wind and marine energy resources, but for years its generators — onshore wind turbines, and some of the earliest tidal and wave energy test projects in the world — have been constrained by a grid connection too small to carry everything they can produce, forcing curtailment on windy days. The new link, roughly doubling the islands’ import-export capacity compared with the existing connection, is designed to let more of that generation reach the mainland grid rather than being switched off. New substations are being built at Finstown on Orkney and at Dounreay in Caithness to tie the new circuit into the wider transmission network.
Nexans manufactured the subsea cable section at its plant in Halden, Norway, with onshore cable produced in Charleroi, Belgium, and accessories made in Cortaillod, Switzerland — a split reflecting how few yards worldwide can produce high-voltage subsea cable at the volumes current grid build-outs require. “With this important manufacturing milestone achieved, project activities continue to progress on several fronts,” Nexans said, noting that onshore installation and jointing work in Orkney is advancing in phases from east to west toward the Warebeth landing point, where the subsea section will come ashore.
One link in a much larger Scottish build-out
SSEN Transmission and Nexans first agreed to reserve cable capacity for the project in 2023, with the full supply and installation contract signed in 2024 — a multi-year lead time typical of subsea interconnector projects, where manufacturing slots at the handful of qualified factories worldwide are booked years in advance. The Orkney Link is one of several transmission projects now under way or recently approved in Scotland and northern England as grid operators work through a backlog of connections needed to move offshore wind power south, alongside projects such as the export cable link approved for SSE’s Berwick Bank wind farm. For Orkney specifically, the new connection is less about enabling a single large project and more about removing a long-standing bottleneck that has limited what the islands’ existing wind, tidal and wave generators — and any future ones — can actually deliver to the rest of Britain.
Part of a wider island-grid pattern
Orkney is also home to the European Marine Energy Centre, which has tested wave and tidal devices since 2003 and has long argued that a weak grid connection, rather than the technology itself, was the main obstacle to commercialising marine energy on the islands. SSEN Transmission is running a wider transmission investment programme across the north of Scotland this decade, of which the Orkney Link is one of the smaller, though symbolically important, pieces — a model other grid operators are repeating in island and peripheral regions with strong renewable resources but historically weak grid connections, such as the Shetland Islands, where a separate subsea link to the mainland began operating in 2024.
Sources
- Offshore Energy, “Orkney Islands’ first link to UK mainland nears offshore installation,” November 13, 2026 — cable specifications, substations, Nexans manufacturing locations and quote, installation timeline. Link
- Nexans, “First electrical transmission link from Orkney Islands” — background on the 2023 capacity reservation agreement and 2024 contract award. Link
Illustrative image. Photo: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source
