Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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 re...

Network resiliency defined as up time entails higher build and operating costs. Resiliency in the subsea cable world reflects two basic principles: good construction practice and physical diversity. Good construction includes an undersea route that minimizes damage and time to repair. In practice this means avoiding areas where there are geophysical threats. These threats include ships, debris slides, earthquakes, and strong undersea currents that erode the protecting shielding of deep sea cables. Good practices include deep burial, undersea repeater redundancy (the number of  spare amplifiers in an undersea repeater), cable armor thickness, etc. Physical diversity means putting a big distance end-to-end between the subsea network and other submarine cables. The farther apart, the less likely a common event disrupts two or more cables. In most cases this means longer undersea paths that increase the construction bill as well as planning costs. Good examples include  the Aprico...