Major Outage

On 19 February 2019 the Western HVDC Link tripped out of service following a fault on the southern (Welsh) onshore land cable section between Wirral landfall at Leasowe and the Flintshire Bridge converter station at Connah's Quay. The outage left the 2,250 MW Hunterston-to-Flintshire Bridge bipolar HVDC link out of service for approximately five weeks while NGET/SPT Upgrades and the original cable contractor Prysmian located the cable fault, executed the joint repair, and re-energised the system. Restoration to service occurred on 22 March 2019. The interruption was the first significant operational outage of the link since its partial energisation in December 2017 and unidirectional availability in October 2018, and was reported by the Western Link operator news feed (news update ID 125, 5 March 2019). The outage was the first in the sequence of 2019-2021 cable faults that contributed to the Ofgem enforcement investigation opened in January 2020.