An Environment Planning Statement for the undersea cable project between Sicily and Malta has been published by Mepa.
The project includes the excavation of a tunnel to pass 132 kV cables from the proposed Interconnector terminal station at Maghtab to the Kappara distribution centre and the excavation of a culvert/trench to link the terminal station to the shoreline at Qalet Marku bay.
The link to Sicily will be a 245kV 3-core 630mm2 Cu high-voltage AC XLPE submarine cable with two embedded fibre optic units. It will be buried 1.5m below the seabed wherever possible.
The cable will be covered with cast iron shells in areas where Posidonia oceanica is present, to minimise environmental impact and it will be covered with rocks in all other areas where it cannot be buried.
The interconnection will be approximately 125km long with a 2x225MW capacity.
The proposed terminal station will have an area of 9,951 square metres surrounded by agricultural land adjacent to the waste disposal site at Magħtab.
The culvert leading from the Magħtab terminal Station to Qalet Marku bay will pass through Triq ir-Ramla to enable the installation of the submarine cable linking Malta to the European electricity grid. The proposed underground tunnel connecting the Magħtab terminal station to the Kappara DC will have two escape shafts spaced out over the tunnel. The tunnel will pass under Magħtab, Għargħur, and Madliena. It will have a width of 5m and a height of about 3m and approximately 3.9 km in length.
The proposed tunnel from the Magħtab terminal station to Kappara is intended to be excavated by means of tunnel boring machines, ideally from two end points, the statement says.
A total of 26 sites in several locations in Malta were considered for the proposed terminal station. Each site was rated according to specific criteria. Eventually, all sites were found to be sufficiently large and to satisfy most of the selection criteria and therefore can be used for the terminal station. However the best site was the one at Magħtab (Żwejra) adjacent to the landfill.
The Magħtab Terminal Station will normally be unmanned during the operational phase. It will consist of a switchgear room containing high voltage 220kV and 132kV switchgear utilising sulphur hexafluoride as the insulating medium and six bays, three of which will contain a transformer in each, whilst the other three will contain shunt reactors used for cable capacitance compensation. Since the transformers and reactors will be filled with insulating oil, in case of an unexpected massive loss of oil, the bays will be connected to oil sumps sufficiently sized to contain all the oil plus a quantity of water so that no contents will spill to the environment.
The project is planned for completion next year.
report was prepared by ais environmental Ltd.