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Should telcos start looking at subsea power cables

Tony Chan | July 14, 2010 | 0 Comments

As we noted a while back, the energy industry is becoming a lot like the telecoms industry.

From what was traditionally national grids, the energy sector is going increasingly cross border. The notion is not new since subsea power transmission cables have been in place to deliver energy from power rich markets to power starved countries, but new developments, such as the US government-led initiative to develop what could be an international smart grid, could now bring both telecoms and power transmission under the same umbrella.

This latest report says that the EU is now planning to provide 100 million euros of funding to build a second submarine power cable between Estonia and Finland.

The new system will have the capacity to transmit some 650 megawatts of power between the two markets. The project is an initiative of Fingrid and Elering, the two grid operators in the respective countries.

At this point, there seems to be no reference to any communications capabilities on the new cable. The big question is, of course, why not?

Not only will the ability to communicate between the grids make the power transmission more effective, since power loads can be balanced and power distribution optimised to where it is needed, but adding data transport to the cable would also facilitate the implementation of smarter grid infrastructure on either end.

The idea is not even new. Power companies have always leveraged their infrastructure to build their own communications networks. In fact, many a telecoms backbone provider – Korea’s Powercom being a prime example – was founded on the networks of the national utility.

There is no reason why the same situation can’t happen in the subsea space. Since much of the investment in subsea cables comes from the wet plant, it probably won’t costs the project developers much to add some fibre along side the power cable and start providing data connectivity between the countries.

Whether or not the two utilities would want build and operate their own telecoms cable is one big question. Whether the government would let them sell extra capacity on it as a telco is another. Whether or not there is demand for telecoms capacity between the two markets is obviously yet another variable.

But there doesn’t seem to be any reason why this model can’t be leverage by telcos themselves. For example, while multiple subsea telecoms cables are being built between Europe and the Middle East, a massive power cable infrastructure is now being proposed to connect Europe to the solar power potential of the Middle East.

An example of HVDC lines connecting Europe with MENA
Source: Hani El Nokraschy, Dr.-Ing. NOKRASCHY ENGINEERING GmbH

Similarly, an Australian organisation, DESERTEC-Australia, is proposing a massive energy transport infrastructure to link several Asian countries to Australia’s rich resources of clean energy. See below.

Energy corridor in Asia
Source: DESERTEC-Australia