Some villages prefer overland power lines to underground cables

Twenty municipalities along the planned route for HVDC (high -voltage direct current) transmission lines to carry wind power from northern Germany to industrial centres in the south, have requested they be constructed as overhead cables rather than buried underground, Andreas Mihm reports for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The cross-country grid infrastructure is supposed be completed by 2025. Following protests that threatened to delay the project considerably, the federal government laregly opted for more expensive but less visible underground cables. But municipalities like Hohe Börde in Saxony Anhalt, through which Suedost-Link will run, are worried about the impact the subterranean lines might have on their soil and have applied to the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) to have the cables suspended from existing pylons.

Read the article in German (behind paywall) here.

For background see a CLEW dossier on the grid expansion and the energy transition here.