The Prysmian Group announced that it has agreed to reserve capacity to supply the cable to the Marinus Link Pty Ltd., a subsidiary of the Australian TSO TasNetworks, for a new power interconnector between Tasmania and Victoria, Australia.

A press release said that the contract for the project, valued at approximately €90 million, will be negotiated and is expected to be finalized within 2024. Prysmian Group has reserved the capacity to design, test, supply and install a HVDC Cable System, consisting of 320 kV single-core cables with XLPE insulation and single-wire armoring, covering both submarine and land sections.

The submarine connection will be approximately 255 km long, from Northwest Tasmania to Waratah Bay, Victoria, while the underground cable will run for approximately 90 km reaching the Latrobe Valley, Victoria. The link will include a submarine fiber optic cable of 255 km.

The submarine cable would be made at the Prysmian Group’s plant in Arco Felice, Italy, while the land cables has been reserved at its plant in either Delft, The Netherlands, or Gron, France. The laying would be done by the Prysmian Group’s Leonardo da Vinci.

Under the Marinus Link project, Prysmian Group is expected to also provide a fully integrated PRY-CAM permanent monitoring system. All cables will be constantly monitored using the PRY-CAM innovative solutions like Distributed Temperature (DTS) and Acoustic Sensing (DAS) to measure all key operating parameters of the whole cable system.

“This capacity reservation agreement has a strategic importance for Prysmian as it underlines our global leadership and strengthens our regional presence in Oceania as a major supplier of an extensive range of high-tech products to power utilities,” said Detlev Waimann, Chief Commercial Officer Projects BU, Prysmian Group.

Of note, the project originally called for two power cables. In 2017, the Marinus Link was designed to include two 750-megawatt cables at a total cost of about $3 billion. Fast forward through a period of global inflation, Covid and raw material cost increases and the projected cost was $5.4 billion. The cost for the project with a single cable was estimated at $1.9 to $2 billion. The single cable, it was said, would achieve about two-thirds of the project value.