National Grid Nemo Link has been granted planning permission from Thanet and Dover District Councils (United Kingdom) to go ahead with developments at the former Richborough power station site. The company had applied for an electricity substation, a converter station and underground cables between Richborough and Pegwell Bay. These developments are the onshore part of a subsea interconnector link to Belgium, known as Nemo Link, jointly developed with Elia, the Belgian transmission company.
This new 1,000 MW interconnection would be the first electricity link between the two countries, running approximately 130 km from Richborough to Zeebrugge in Belgium. The county of Kent already has two interconnectors with Europe. The Interconnexion France Angleterre (IFA) runs between France and Selinge and the BritNed interconnector runs between the Netherlands and the Isle of Grain. It’s proposed that the Nemo interconnector could go into operation by 2018.