Prysmian installs HVAC land and submarine cables for 660 MW Hudson project

Telecom cable systems company Prysmian Group has achieved ‘substantial completion’ of the underground and submarine power link between New York City and the New Jersey transmission grid known as the Hudson Project. The link is now in commercial operation.

Under a contract worth in excess of $175m awarded by Hudson Transmission Partner in November 2011 as part of a larger contract awarded to the consortium of Prysmian and Siemens Energy, the Group was responsible for the design, supply and installation of a 345 kV high voltage alternate current (HVAC) land and submarine transmission line running along a total route of approximately 13 km to transfer 660 MW of existing power from the transmission grid in Ridgefield, New Jersey to New York City. Siemens built the back-to-back converter station located in Ridgefield, NJ.

Prysmian installed a bundle of three high-voltage submarine cables and two optical fibre data transmission cables under a portion of the Hudson River using its own cable-laying ship Giulio Verne. The submarine cable system was buried in a bundle below the river bottom at depths ranging from 10 to 15 feet using the Prysmian-designed hydro-plow machine. The submarine cables were produced at Prysmian’s Arco Felice, Italy, plant.

All high-voltage land cables were produced at Prysmian’s VCV factory in Abbeville, South Carolina, and installed by Prysmian’s installation services group located in New Jersey. The Prysmian US content in the project was completed by the supply and installation of land fibre cables produced in the Lexington fibre-optic cabling facility. In New York City, the underground cable system was installed under city streets for approximately 0.64 km to the ConEd West 49th Street substation.

The Hudson Project is of strategic importance for the City of New York where energy load is constantly increasing. Now it can help replace resources that may be retired over the next several years as well as strengthen the overall reliability of the power supply system in NYC as a long-term infrastructure asset. It is also expected to provide New York City customers access to more diverse sources of power, including renewable sources and natural gas.

The project is the second major power transmission infrastructure project built by Prysmian in the New York and New Jersey areas in recent years, following the 2007 completion of the 500 kV Neptune project. In the US, also, in 2010, Prysmian completed successfully the construction of the Trans Bay Cable project, a 200 kV HVDC submarine power link between the cities of Pittsburg, CA and San Francisco.

“We are proud of this new achievement that sums up to our already long-standing track record of activity in New York City,” stated Marcello Del Brenna, CEO of Prysmian Powerlink, “from the first high-voltage underground cables in the early 30s to the more recent state-of-the-art submarine interconnections.”

North America represents a key area for the Group. “We are strongly committed to support the development of the entire region’s electrical infrastructure with unprecedented efforts as the Group’s prompt intervention at the Bayway refinery located on New York Harbour in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy demonstrated,” remarked Hakan Ozmen, CEO of Prysmian Group North America.