EU to provide ‘strong political and technical support’ for Great Sea Interconnector

The European Commission will provide “strong political and technical support” for the Great Sea Interconnector, European Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen said on Sunday.

“I am personally very actively involved and continue to be in contact with my counterparts in Cyprus and Greece. I can assure you that the commission will continue to provide strong political support, in close cooperation with Greece and Cyprus,” he told the Cyprus News Agency.

This support, he said, will include “dedicated events and high-level discussions, as well as additional engagement on geopolitical issues”.

He lamented that the fact that Cyprus is at present the only European Union member state not connected to the continent’s interconnected energy grid “limits its integration into the internal energy market and makes it difficult to integrate renewable energy sources”.

On the interconnector itself, he said that the project’s progress “has been affected by a complex geopolitical context, with implications for timetables and costs”.

However, he said, the interconnector project “is very strategic and requires full cooperation and coordination between the member states involved”.

If completed, the Great Sea Interconnector will link the energy grids of Cyprus, Greece, and Israel, with President Nikos Christodoulides having been in contact with both Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the matter.

However, the project was dealt something of a blow earlier this month when Nexans, the French company contracted to manufacture the cables for the project, formally acknowledged that the delivery schedule for those cables is being renegotiated, pushing the planned completion date into the next decade.

Nonetheless, Cypriot Energy Minister Michael Damianos had last month insisted that the project “will not collapse”.

Much of the attention related to the project so far has been related to the interconnection of Cyprus and Greece, with the two countries’ governments having appeared to have been at odds over the matter in recent months, though Damianos had on this matter insisted that they now have “a common line on this specific issue”.

This, he said, was “established during the brief discussion” he held with his Greek counterpart Stavros Papastavrou on the sidelines of the European Union’s transport, telecommunications, and energy (TTE) council meeting in Brussels last month.

He said that in that meeting, he and Papastavrou had “agreed that the project is progressing normally”, and that at the same time, “the corresponding assurances were received” from Nexans.

In November, the governments of Cyprus and Greece jointly announced that the “economic and technical parameters” of the project would be “updated” with a view to attracting more investors to the project.

These new economic and technical parameters are to come alongside a fresh feasibility study for the project.