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The author is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an advisor to Disruptive Industry, a threat intelligence company.
Fantasy is plagued by the international ocean. An important submarine cable has been cut, causing the youkai of modern life to suddenly stop.
Along the seabed there are thousands of kilometres of interconnectors that transport electricity between the country and the island, and between offshore facilities and the mainland. These wires are easier to damage, more difficult to repair, and more expensive than fiber optic communication cables. It makes them the primary target of sabotage.
Many incidents, including submarine installation damage, appear intentional. National politicians such as German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius have publicly proposed it.
For example, on Christmas Day, the Gulf of Finland’s Estlink 2 Power Interconector stopped working alongside several communication cables.
The oil tanker known as the Eagle S, which saw it pass through the cable at the time, was seized by Finnish police and coastal police officers shortly after the cable was cut. Finnish authorities suspect that the tanker is part of the Russian “shadow fleet” and a “shadow fleet” of vessels used to bypass oil sanctions, and will use anchors to intentionally cut cables.
However, it is difficult to prove intentional sabotage. Earlier this month, Finland released a tanker, but investigations are continuing.
The problem of distinguishing between intentional damage and negligence complicates repairs. Standard insurance is ineffective for damages that are the result of “belief conduct.”
It’s no surprise that Estlink 2 owners (Fingrid and Estonia’s Elering) are saying they’re suing the owners of the Eagle.
Like other cables that have recently been damaged in the Baltic Sea and off the coast of Taiwan, Estlink 2 extends along the seabed and is buried in a protective layer of soil. Send electricity from Estonia to Finland.
In recent years, interconnects have increased significantly in both length and number. Energy companies are installing more cables to link offshore energy fields, including wind farms with onshore facilities. They are also trying to use cables to reduce energy imports from hostile countries.
The interconnectors look like fiber optic cables, but they are quite large and more difficult to repair. They don’t work in pairs, and in most cases there is a shortage of ambulances that fiber optic cables usually enjoy in the form of repair vessels contracted to correct the damage.
Therefore, operators rely on small pools of repair ships to assist. “That means the downtime will be much longer. In the North Sea, you can see three months. In places with less resources, it can be up to nine months.”
A serious shortage of repair ships adds to the delay. The owner of Estlink 2 had a hard time finding a repair ship and crew.
Power outages caused by negotiated cables can have disastrous effects, said Neil Roberts, secretary of the Joint Warfare Commission of the Maritime Insurance Sector. “It’s easy to imagine almost immediate social difficulties, as people may not be able to buy food or fuel, for example, if the shop can’t handle the transaction.”
Extended suspensions are also expensive for operators. Every day the interconnector is not working, operators lose money. “If repairs cost 20 million euros recently, you’re probably doing well, but insurance companies are now seeing claims of nearly 40 million euros,” Goldring says.
High-tech sub-wires are an important part of the infrastructure. Fiber optic cable attacks are a source of legitimate concern, but electrical interconnections are a vulnerability that we should really worry about.
