COPENHAGEN, March 10 (Reuters) – An undersea power cable linking Finland and Sweden suffered an unexpected outage on Tuesday due to a technical fault, but there were no indications of sabotage, operators Fingrid and Svenska kraftnat said on Tuesday.
The Baltic Sea region has been on high alert after a string of underwater power cable, telecom link and gas pipeline outages since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with sabotage and shipping accidents blamed for the incidents.
Tuesday’s outage on the Fenno-Skan 2 interconnector appeared to have been caused by a malfunction at a substation, while the undersea cable section appeared to be unharmed, Fingrid spokesperson Jonne Jappinen said.
Sweden’s Svenska kraftnat also said the outage was caused by technical faults and that no police or any other law enforcement agencies were involved in the probe.
The outage on the 800 megawatt (MW) power line was expected to last for around 18 hours, according to a regulatory statement published by Svenska kraftnat on the Nord Pool messaging platform.
“Our assessment is that Fenno-Skan will be operational again shortly,” the Swedish company said in a statement to Reuters.
(Reporting by Stine Jacobsen and Soren Jeppesen in Copenhagen and Essi Lehto in Helsinki, editing by Terje Solsvik and Louise Heavens)
