Vast volumes of green electricity could be flowing through a 4,000-kilometre underwater powerline between Canada and Europe by 2040, if three UK-based investment bankers’ vision for a major new transatlantic energy artery becomes reality.
Their $30 billion-plus project, the North Atlantic Transmission One Link (NATO-L), was sparked in 2022, when the sabotage of the giant Nordstream gas pipeline crossing under the Baltic Sea exposed the EU’s dangerous overdependence on Russian energy resources.
But now, with US tariffs motivating Canada to pivot toward "strengthening ties with reliable allies" in Europe for trade and security, as Prime Minister Mark Carney recently stated, an opportunity is emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. Laurent Segalen, one of the founders along with Gerard Reid and Simon Ludlam, of NATO-L, calls it a “crystallizing moment” for the project.
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come,” Segalen told Canada’s National Observer, quoting French novelist Victor Hugo.
“The trigger was the attack on Nordstream, but this is about the longer-standing issue of strategic flexibility of energy import and export – and the mutual benefits that come with that,” he said.
“Yes, there are challenges [in building NATO-L], but nothing that can’t be overcome. Ultimately, the bigger the grid, the better it is for everybody, in terms of the cost of electricity, energy security, economic development and so on.”
Industrial infrastructure
Industrial infrastructure has been laid across the Atlantic since 1866, when the first permanent telegraph cable was reeled out from Britain to the US. A pioneering telephone trunkline, known as TAT-1, was installed on the seabed 90 years later.
And though high-voltage direct current (HVDC) power lines like NATO-L are more technologically complex and costly than telecommunications cables, the planned 6-gigawatt (GW) transmission line is one of a growing number of long-distance HVDC mega-projects in development around the world today.
Two of the more advanced are the 4,000 kilometre XLinks line planned between Morocco and the UK and the 5,100-kilometre AAPowerLink that would connect Australia to Singapore, though both these are export lines rather than two-way interconnectors like NATO-L.
Segalen points to the 765-kilometre Viking Link that since switch-on at the end of 2023 has been coursing power in real-time back and forth across the North Sea between the British and Danish grids, as a more relevant comparison.
“Viking Link transports power between the UK and Denmark whenever and in whichever direction it is needed [to meet demand]. It works, no question,” he said. “ So what if we ‘stretch’ such a cable to five times its length to get [NATO-L]?”
HVDC specialists including Cornelis Plet, head of HVDC technology at DNV, an international assurance and risk management company, believes that while laying any power cable more than 1,000 kilometres long would be “uncharted territory for the industry, there are no major red flags” with the NATO-L project.
“This is a major engineering challenge to be sure, but from our work on this topic we didn’t spot any impossibilities or real ‘showstoppers’,” he said, speaking with Canada’s National Observer.
Today, because of a number of factors, including the “material strength” limitations of the insulation used to minimize power loss from a cable’s copper-wire core, 2 GW is as big as an offshore line can be, resulting in NATO-L needing to bundle three together to get the transmission capacity it needs.
This is not without its advantages in fact, Plet noted. Having a trio of cables, he said, would afford “a kind of back-up” should one of the lines fail and so “overall system availability would be higher”, improving the project’s economics.
The “real beauty” of NATO-L though, according to Richard Black, director of policy at Ember, a research consultancy, which recently published a report on transatlantic power transmission, lies in the international time-zones the line would bridge.
“Interconnection would help immensely with both demand and supply variability, really smoothing out grids on both sides of the Atlantic,” he told Canada’s National Observer. “Europe is asleep when North America is still awake and vice versa, so contrasting power demand profiles match up well too.”
Demand and supply stabilizer
Segalen adds the time difference between the two grids could create a “harmony based on each understanding the other’s peak [demand] periods and times when generation is surplus” to demand.
This balancing of grids would be especially important for such a long-distance offshore interconnector, which, according to DNV calculations, could see power losses as high as 13 per cent - compared to around four per cent for onshore HVDC lines, deeply impacting the economics of the electricity through the line.
To progress the megaproject, a NATO-L foundation for “people, nations and institutions” is being set up to raise the massive amount of capital required, said Segalen, with expectations the powerline could be financed in eight years and operational three to five years later.
Meeting the fast-growing demand for clean energy in Europe and North America - Canada expects to see electricity demand more than double by 2050 to meet government net-zero emissions targets - will “future-proof” NATO-L, he said.
So too will construction of the next wave of power-hungry data centres, Segalen added, “which will add who knows how much to the demand-side” of the energy system.
The founders of the NATO-L project view it as “not just an infrastructure project, it would be a symbol of cooperation between democracies.” It’s an identification that will resonate loudly with Canadians as the country’s trade war with the US has led to calls for greater energy sovereignty and independence from its southern neighbour.
“As North America electrifies, Canada was going to have increased interconnection within the country and with the US. One of those is off the table, so Europe suddenly does look like a very good bet,” said Black. “And the political relations between Canada and Europe are already excellent.”
Segalen added: “This project is not a counterthreat to the US. It is more about diversification of markets. There is no enemy. Only energy security for Canada and Europe, economics, jobs, and market internationalization. There is an opportunity here to stop playing defense in the global energy landscape and start playing offense.”
Canadian offshore wind export?
If NATO-L gets built as planned, the timing might be ideal for Canada’s burgeoning east coast offshore wind sector. Though a lead-off 5 GW offshore wind auction is slated for later this year, the sector faces an uncertain future without a clear “route to market” for future power generation due to the sparse industrial and residential demand in the Maritime provinces.
Until now, the major cities in the US northeast — New York, Boston, Philadelphia — were the likeliest destinations for this energy, but President Donald Trump’s renewables moratorium has cast a pall over this plan. Meanwhile, the early promise of using offshore wind to produce green hydrogen for shipment into international markets has not materialized as quickly as once forecast.
Having Europe as an alternative market for Atlantic Canadian offshore wind power “may be another way out” for this energy resource, said Plet. “NATO-L is a very good option for all this wind power, if the local grid can be reinforced to handle the connection to such a big power line.”
The European side was well-equipped already, he added, pointing to the numerous energy islands - offshore hubs for collecting and distributing electricity generated by wind farms at sea - that are currently under development.
Black thinks that in the long run NATO-L transforming Europe into an export market for Canadian wind and hydropower could mean interest in green hydrogen production — for which Canada has three memoranda of understanding with Germany — wanes further.
“Once the economics of a project like a transatlantic interconnector become clear, we may see the market for green hydrogen shrink,” he said.
Given the pace at which the world is electrifying, with record installations of 560 GW of renewables last year, according to the International Energy Agency, interconnectors will be edge-pieces in the global energy transition puzzle.
“NATO-L will eventually get built — even if not by us — because it answers all the questions about energy supply, energy sovereignty, energy security in Canada and Europe,” said Segalen.
“The bigger the grid, the better for everybody. Good for all countries involved, good for consumers, good for society.”
Comments
Each of the three cables is to provide 2 GW, for a total of 6 GW. I deduce that the Earth is to be used for the return current. What are the consequences of this?
The direct current will have an effect on the magnetic field; is this significant? For navigation? For bird navigation? For other geophysical measurements?
This is an ambitious and very relevant concept. The timing is great with respect to Trump's Drill Baby Drill narrative promoting oil and gas over electrons.
Canada's East Coast has phenomenal wind power potential. Quebec's hydroelectricity is already at a huge scale. The option to transmit power east to Europe and west across continental Canada opens up an unimaginable set of trading relationships not seen before.
Trump's anti-Canadian sovereignty rhetoric has, in this respect, done Canada a big favour. We have been jolted awake and punched out of our sleepy complacency about our deep and now troublesome dependency on the US.
If Canada was smart it would seize on this project and become a full partner. It will really help the nation get over its addiction to exporting fossil fuels with a new kind of energy export that also accommodates renewable power imports that could offset wear and maintenance of provincial power generation machinery. Coupled with a trans-Canadian interprovincial transmission grid, our clean power connectivity would stretch across half the globe with NS, Nfdl. NB and QC located roughly in the centre.
An intriguing concept indeed.
I'm not sure I see the point. With modern renewables, electricity can be generated everywhere. With modern, and still rapidly developing, battery technologies it can be stored everywhere. Plus, over that long a distance surely there is going to be a good deal of loss even with huge DC cables. I don't get why this is supposed to be worth more than the trouble of building it.
Finally, there are the political issues around depending for energy on countries on the other side of the ocean--specifically, from the European point of view, depending on the United States, which is clearly not trustworthy and would have little compunction about turning off the power as a political weapon. One of the nice things about the renewables revolution is precisely that it enables more local control over energy; why spend billions in an attempt to give that advantage away?
And further to that, there is the question of ownership. Thirty billion, on a N. American scale is not a lot of money (see Trans Mountain Pipeline or several recent corporate buyouts) so it could easily be funded through tradable shares and then monetized by the highest bidder - likely a US company.
If we have another $30 billion to invest, let's go for distributed networks in Canada, owned by regional utilities. And I mean 'small regional', like New Westminster electricity, rather than public companies like Fortis who are not intrinsically service oriented, but profit driven, i.e. capitalist not communitarian-commercial.
Good point.
Decentralized renewables in Canada seem to counter the logic behind big projects like this. But only when you look at our historic energy landscape and industrial policy which is chock full of rip & ship and devoid of value capture by making stuff at home.
Europe is much more densely populated and has a very intense industrial foundation. You could fit 2 1/2 Germany's into BC's land area alone, and that's with twice the population of Canada. The energy demand is enormous, and their fossil supply was recently cut off by Russia. They are scrambling for alternatives while also putting renewables into high gear.
No wonder they're looking at big, far reaching projects like this. Wind and hydroelectricity in eastern Canada is like Sahara desert sunshine to solar investors in the UK who are actually building a solar power cable connection from Africa to meet demand in the UK.
In Canada it's mocked. In Europe it's a serious endeavour mainly because of their concentrated industry and big cities.
No idea is too ridiculous, apparently.
And the notion that this is, in part, inspired by the sabotaged Nordstream pipeline or other Baltic undersea infrastructure is bizarre, given its length and therefore higher degree of vulnerability.
But, the primary question is from where the electricity, in excess of Western Hemisphere demand, will be sourced?
Signs of intelligent, terrestrial life remain still to be discovered.
Apparently intelligent terrestrial life are already at work building a big, very long undersea cable from Morocco to the UK. Sahara sunshine is seen as a reliable year round energy source, and the UK as having enough demand to pull billions into investing in it.
It seems to me that that the lesson of the Russia-dependent Nordstream pipeline, apart from the need to avoid relying on Russia, is the vulnerability to attack by any such major energy conduit, whether of oil, gas, or electricity, especially one of the length and importance proposed here. One of the great attractions of green energy is that it can be decentralized and therefore invulnerable to a similar attack. In a world as prone to turmoil as this one, laying a green energy cable across the Atlantic and making hundreds of millions of people dependent on it for their energy is asking for trouble.