The Harmony Link power interconnection between Lithuania and Poland will be built on land and will run alongside the European standard-gauge railway Rail Baltica, Energy Minister Dainius Kreivys has said.
“It has now been agreed that Harmony Link will be built on land, rather than at sea, alongside the Rail Baltica tracks,” Kreivys said.
This will reduce the costs of building the link by a factor of three, according to the minister.
“As you know, the cost of the offshore project almost tripled to 1.7 billion euros, from almost 800 million euros, which was an unacceptable cost,” the minister said.
“A solution was found that it could run alongside the railway tracks, bringing the cost down by a factor of three, back to its initial estimate, but in order to do that, a whole series of European documents had to be changed, which required a political agreement among all parties,” Kreivys said.
“We have such a political declaration already,” he added.
On the sidelines of the EU Energy Council in Brussels on December 19, the European Commission, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland signed a political declaration on synchronising the Baltic electricity grids with Western Europe until February 2025. The document also includes a commitment to accelerating the implementation of the Harmony Link.
Under a contract signed in May 2020, Litgrid and PSE split the work on the Harmony Link project, with the Lithuanian power transmission system operator responsible for the construction of the HVDC cable in the Baltic Sea and its Polish counterpart in charge of building the converter stations in the two neighbouring countries.
The Harmony Link was initially valued at 680 million euros in total, including 493 million euros in EU funding.
It was planned that the 700-megawatt, 330-kilometer HVDC submarine cable would link the Zarnowiec substation in Poland’s Pomeranian region with the Darbenai substation in the western Lithuanian district of Kretinga. (LRT/Business World Magazine)