Oct 16th 2021
CLV Nexans Aurora
IMAGINE A TOY boat that might fit in the palm of your hand. At mid-ship add a squat spool of sewing thread lying on its side. Scale that up about a thousand-fold and the result is the 150-metre-long Nexans Aurora. The thread in question is kilometres of high-voltage power line ready to be deployed from the aft of the ship across the sea floor. Each cable, weighing a hefty 150kg per metre and thick as a tree trunk, is a woven mix of aluminium, steel, lead and insulating material. The single stretch loaded up in a bobbin nearly 30 metres across is as heavy as the Eiffel Tower.
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The ways electricity is both consumed (more of it, notably by cars) and produced (also more, increasingly through renewable sources, see chart 1) are changing. Balancing energy supply and demand is never easy, as…
