Improving Resiliency In Wake of the Iberian Peninsula Blackout: 2Africa, ACE, ...

First Point: The Portugal and Spanish grids are tightly integrated with limited power connector to the rest of Europe. Solar and wind play a big role and both power sources suffer from what is known as frequency instability. Solar and wind generated power is much more volatile than traditional power sources. Traditional power generators have angular momentum inertia. It takes a while to up or lower the power due to the inertia in the spinning components. A natural gas turbine takes a few minutes to spin up. A nuclear reactor an hour to lower or increase output by 10% (French reactors do load following). Solar and wind create very volatile power fluctuations that can easily trigger a circuit breaker. In an isolated grid if a circuit breaker is triggered, the power in the remaining active part of the grid increases. This triggers more circuit breakers and usually brings down the entire grid.

2. The consequence of the first point is that avoiding a repeat of the Iberian Penisula outage requires landing outside Iberia or ensuring that the Iberian CLS is not one of the two main trunk power sources.

3. Routing traffic up Africa's East Coast won't work. The Red Sea conflict means that 2Africa cannot be completed any time soon between Marseille and Mombasa. This leaves the buyer with only the Seacom (TATA owns fibre pairs on it) and EIG. Market pricing to Marseille is $50K to $80K a month. For most Tier 2 African ISPs these are death sentence prices.

4. Point 3 means you must go up the West Coast using either ACE which lands in power stable France or Glo-1 and 2Africa which land on the Southwest beaches of the UK at Bude and share a common Vodafone cable landing station.

5. ACE can deliver traffic to Paris, but its capacity is expensive and the system has a history of outages, a lot of them due to poor back haul design and construction. Although ACE has a bridging unit to Lisbon, I don't believe Lisbon is a power source for the main trunk. That is likely to be from Lagos to the French CLS.

6. Your best bet therefore is Glo-1 or 2Africa. The latter has the best pricing as well as probably the best network performance due to the high construction standards and extensive geophysical survey.

Map of Fibre Optic Subsea 2Africa Cable

Map of Fibre Optic Subsea GLO-1 Cable

Map Of The Fibre Optic ACE Subsea Cable


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