July 7 (SeeNews) - Greek industrial conglomerate Mytilineos said on Thursday that it signed an agreement to construct a new high-voltage overhead transmission line, which is part of the planned Greece-Bulgaria electrical interconnection that will boost the European transmission system in the Southeast Europe (SEE) region.
The contract is for nine months, plus 18 months of warranty, and is worth some 9.97 million euro ($10.2 million), the Greek company said in a statement. It was signed between Mytilineos' Sustainable Engineering Solutions (SES) business unit and Greece's Independent Power Transmission Operator, IPTO, the owner and operator of the Hellenic Electricity Transmission System (HETS).
The industrial conglomerate will be in charge of building the 30-km 400-kV electricity transmission line on the Greek side that will form part of the power link between the two countries at Nea Santa high voltage centre (HVC) and the Maritsa East substation.
The interconnection will pave the way for new renewable energy projects in the Thrace and Eastern Macedonian regions in northern Greece, Mytilineos added.
The Greece-Bulgaria interconnection is a project worth 66.4 million euro overall, which involves the construction of an overhead transmission line, an underground transmission line, substation and interconnection, with a total length of 151 kilometres, of which 30 km in Greek territory.
The power link will boost cross-border electricity trade by increasing transmission capacity to 800 MW in the direction of Greece to Bulgaria and to 1,350 MW in the Bulgaria-Greece direction.
Construction on the Bulgarian side started in 2020.
New energy interconnections in the Balkans are seen by the European Union and countries in the region as a key step to ensure the future security of supply, in particular in the context of the ongoing threat to energy supplies from the war in Ukraine and the goal to increase the share of renewables in the European energy mix by 2030.
($ = 0.9794)