EU Funding Boondoggles: Polar Connect

 Dubious EU Funded Submarine Projects - Polar Connect.

The EU embodies activist government. It is seeding a large number of digital infrastructure projects many of which have only a small chance of success. My nomination for the most dubious EU-backed subsea cable initiative is Polar Connect. The idea is to connect Europe to Asia via a subsea cable that is deployed directly under the polar cap to link Japan to Europe. The backers of this plan include NorduNet, the Swedish Research Council, and others. EU has committed 5.6 million Euros to the project over three years for initial design and research. 

This project takes advantage of the EU's lack of submarine cable expertise and its perennial itch to intervene in capitalism in the belief that it has the wisdom to improve it. NorduNet has unscrupulously been tossing out capex estimates of under $250 million. This is absurd. Such a project would require a specialized cable ship plus two icebreakers. And there would have to be a sea mapping as well. A realistic cost estimate is closer to a half billion dollars. The shortest path from Norway to Japan is 10,000 kilometers. A good guess is that a deployment involving 3 ships for both the marine survey as well as the actual deployment would cost $50,000 per kilometer. Furthermore, such a cable would extremely vulnerable to ice damage. Moreover, repairs would require three ships as well. Given the difficulty of rounding up 3 qualified vessels to do such a repair it is likely the cable could be down per incident for at least a half year or more. In the last two years the Southeast Asian cable APG has been down 12 months despite a much friendlier climate than the Arctic and better ship availability. 

Given this project's immense cost combined with the likelihood of long and frequent outages, it is difficult to imagine that private sector participants would volunteer to be anchor tenants. Yet so bewitched is the EU Commission by the idea of digital sovereignty which in this case really means avoiding the US, that it is throwing away money on a project that is really quite farfetched. 

Map of the proposed Polar Connect subsea cable.



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