PARIS (Reuters) - The engineering, procurement and construction contract for an undersea cable between Spain and France across the Bay of Biscay was provisionally awarded to HKT HV cables and Prysmian Powerlink, French grid operator RTE said on Friday.
The Inelfe project, a joint venture between Spanish transmission system operator Red Electrica and French counterpart RTE, consists of two high-voltage direct current lines with a capacity of 1 gigawatt (GW) each.
Additionally, the engineering, procurement and construction contract for converter stations was provisionally awarded to the Hitachi Energy/Vinci consortium, RTE said.
In the coming weeks, the project will enter into exclusive negotiations with each of the suppliers, with the aim of signing the contracts before May 2023, according to RTE.
Construction is expected to start at the end of the summer.
The award of contracts took place following a joint statement by the French and Spanish regulators, CRE and CNMC, confirming interest in the project and offering a new cost assessment amounting to 2.85 billion euros ($3.02 billion).
A risk provision of 250 million euros was added to the cost.
The interconnection was designed to double existing transmission capacity between the countries and would allow Spain to feed its renewable energy into a wider European grid, which has become increasingly more important after Russia's invasion of Ukraine unleashed an energy crisis in Europe last year.
The project raised several disagreements between the countries, such as who would bear the additional costs of the interconnection, as well as design issues and disputes on other topics the bled into the project.
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