News

To transmit wind power from the windy North to the South, SuedLink, a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line consisting of multiple underground cables, is to be built in Germany.
The SuedLink is approx. 700 km long and will be implemented by the two project developers TransnetBW GmbH and TenneT TSO GmbH, with two 2 GW connections each starting in Schleswig-Holstein and running via Baden-Württemberg to Bavaria.

The project developer TransnetBW GmbH has submitted the first permit application documents for the southernmost permit application section, E3, to the Federal Network Agency. ILF, as the regional engineering office, has assisted with the preparation of these documents. The Federal Network Agency has already confirmed the completeness of the documents and the process of making the documents available for public review has been initiated.

What’s special about permit application section E3 is that this section of the transmission line runs through the Südwestdeutsche Salzwerke AG’s mines. The special structure in the mines will be connected via two new shafts, which will be almost 200 m deep. With the initiation of the final phase of the approval procedure, the foundations for an early start to construction of the SuedLink in the Heilbronn region have now been laid.

In the North, ILF, as the responsible regional engineering office, has also contributed to the permit application documents for permit application section A2 – the first northern section of the transmission line – being submitted to the Federal Network Agency in due time by the project developer TenneT TSO GmbH. The particular challenge in this section was to integrate the requested alignment for the two underground cables into the design documents for the special structure ElbX, an approx. 5-km-long tunnel structure between Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony that runs under the River Elbe.