Positive
Project advancing - milestone achieved
Medium Impact
Significant progress or notable issue
By December 2024, the Muir Mhòr project team, a joint venture between Fred. Olsen Seawind and Vattenfall, had completed detailed grid connection and cable route engineering for the Muir Mhòr Transmission system. Using Continuum Industries’ Optioneer tool, they evaluated export cable routes linking 17 potential landfall locations and more than five onshore substation sites along the east coast of Scotland, integrating environmental, social, engineering and cost constraints to select a preferred connection option and final cable corridor for the Planning Permission in Principle (PPP) application. The resulting design brings offshore export cables ashore via horizontal directional drilling at Lunderton Bay about 1 km north of Peterhead, then follows an underground onshore cable corridor of approximately 4 km to a new 275/400 kV onshore substation at Westerton near Torterston, and a further 4 km underground link to Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks Transmission’s planned 400 kV Netherton Hub, with the corridor defined up to 100 m wide and up to 15 km from landfall to the grid point. The onshore transmission works are engineered to accommodate 2 GW of future coordinated connection capacity through ducting for six cable circuits, with three export cables forming the initial 1 GW Muir Mhòr connection, and the routeing process was supported by GIS-based analysis, environmental surveys, civil engineering studies and site walkovers.