Contractors sought for £700m undersea electricity link

Firms have been alerted to work worth £700m on an undersea electricity link between Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The LirlC connector, which will run between Ayrshire and the Belfast region, will provide up to 700MW of capacity between the Irish Single Electricity Market and the British wholesale electricity market.

Transmission Investment, the company developing LirlC, is inviting bids for four main packages under the scheme, each running for up to seven years.

Under lot A1, worth £353m, firms are sought for the design, supply and installation of two converter stations at Hunterston and Kilroot.

The stations will connect LirlC to the 275kV high voltage network in Northern Ireland and the 400kV high voltage network in Scotland.

Lot A2 relates to £100m of civils and building works associated with the converter stations.

A third lot, B1, valued at £245m, will see firms design, supply and install HVDC cables between the two converter stations, a route of about 140km buried underground or under the Irish Sea.

The final lot, B2, worth £8m, relates to cables and associated civils works in Scotland only.

The project was recently awarded an in-principle cap and floor arrangement by Ofgem as well as a transmission licence in Northern Ireland.

A cap and floor mechanism regulates how much money can be earned from a scheme once in operation, providing developers with a minimum return and a limit on the potential upside for a 25-year period.

The project is targeting financial close in the third quarter of 2027.

The deadline for requests to participate is 24 April, with a decision expected in November.

For more information, firms are invited to contact Brian Dunn at Transmission Investment.

LirlC is one of three electricity interconnector links given the go-ahead by regulator Ofgem at the end of last year to improve security of supply.

The other two are the Tarchon Energy interconnector, a 610km subsea cable between East Anglia and Niederlangen, Germany, which would deliver up to 1.4GW of electricity capacity; and the 190km-long MaresConnect interconnector between Bodelwyddan, North Wales and the Republic of Ireland, providing 750MW of capacity.