Transmission system operator Amprion is starting planning for an 8GW offshore wind underground cable project from the North Sea to southern Germany.
The Rhine-Main Link is one of the key grid expansion projects to supply Germany with climate-neutral energy by 2045.
The power connection is expected to bring up to 8GW of power from offshore wind energy directly to Hesse and strengthen the economic area there.
With the Rhein-Main-Link, Amprion is planning to bundle four direct current underground cable projects in a common energy corridor over a length of 500 kilometres for the first time.
Dominik Stunder, overall project manager for the Rhine-Main Link, said: “We are now speeding up the planning.
“To speed things up, we are relying on the Federal Network Agency’s new preference area procedure.
“The new procedure replaces time-consuming federal sectoral planning.”
The Rhine-Main Link consists of the four projects with the designations DC34, DC35, NOR-19-2 and NOR-19-3.
For the DC34 connection, which is already enshrined in law, the preference area now had to be applied for at the German Federal Network Agency.
By the end of November 2023, the authority will present this five- to ten-kilometre-wide space for the later underground cable route and consult it publicly.
This application was not necessary for the other three projects, as the legislator had already defined the streamlined procedure for future direct current connections last year.
In order to further accelerate the process, Amprion said it would also like to apply the new legal provisions of the EU Emergency Regulation, which simplify the requirements for environmental protection and species protection.
Amprion intends to enter into the planning approval procedure for the Rhine-Main Link as early as 30 June 2024.
This then determines the specific course of the line within the preference space.
From 2033, the first 2GW of offshore capacity are to flow to Hesse.
The two offshore grid connection systems NOR-19-2 and NOR-19-3 start in the North Sea and run to Ried in Hesse and Kriftel respectively.
In doing so, they are to pass through the starting region of the other two DC connections DC34 and DC35, Amprion said.