Estlink 2″ Power Link Between Estonia and Finland Falls Out on Wednesday, Cause Unknown
The Estonian grid operator Elering reported that the high-voltage direct current (HVDC) connection “Estlink 2” between Estonia and Finland failed on Wednesday, with the cause of the outage currently unknown.
The incident is reminiscent of the severing of the telecommunications cable “C-Lion-1” in the Baltic Sea between Germany and Finland about a month ago, when investigators suspected sabotage. A Chinese cargo ship, which had previously left a Russian Baltic Sea port, was suspected of being involved, having allegedly turned off its beacon signal for a 180-kilometer stretch and dragging its anchor across the seafloor.
The 170-kilometer-long “Estlink 2” power link also runs for 147 kilometers as a submarine cable. According to a report by the Finnish public broadcaster Yle, the Finnish Border Guard escorted an oil tanker that was tracked by the Marine Traffic service as being in the area of the submarine cable at the time of the outage, and suddenly losing speed. The report suggests that the tanker, flying the flag of the Cook Islands, may be part of the Russian “shadow fleet” allegedly transporting oil from Russia to the Baltic Sea in defiance of the embargo.
Elering and Fingrid, the Finnish grid operator, stated that immediate measures were taken to identify the cause of the “Estlink 2” outage as quickly as possible, and that the power supply security of Estonia and Finland is guaranteed. Elering is prepared to use reserve capacities in the region if needed to compensate for the power lost through “Estlink 2.”
The incident occurs just before the planned separation of the power grids of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from those of Russia and Belarus in February 2025. The Baltic states signed a declaration in August 2023 to accelerate the integration of their power grids with the continental European network (CEN) in response to the Russia-Ukraine war, with the necessary network reinforcements supported by over 1.2 billion euros from the EU’s “Connecting Europe for Energy” facility.