Field Trip to the A-Nord Grid Expansion Project

The construction of the A-Nord high-voltage direct current (HVDC) connection from the North Sea to the Rhineland is one of Germany’s key grid expansion projects. For the cable route alone, approximately 5.49 million cubic metres of soil must be excavated and reinstalled. Additional construction sections include joint pits, special structures (e.g. at the Ems Side Canal), and crossings of major rivers such as the Rhine.
This corresponds to roughly 366,000 truckloads. However, most of the excavated material is reinstalled largely unchanged and at its natural density; it is only temporarily stored laterally in soil stockpiles.

As part of the A-Nord project, Amprion GmbH is installing underground power cables over a distance of more than 300 kilometres, with a transmission capacity of two gigawatts. The route runs from Emden on the North Sea coast to Osterath in the Rhineland. In the standard construction method, two trenches are excavated for the six cables, each approximately 6.5 metres wide and 2 metres deep. In addition, two further offshore systems are being constructed in parallel in Lower Saxony.

Students from our institute were able to gain first-hand insights into the different construction methods in the NRW1 section near Rhede and Rees. During the field trip, the open-cut method, flush drilling, and microtunnelling techniques were presented and discussed on site.

The research group would like to thank Nico Keßler (Amprion GmbH), Dr Benjamin Schieber (Taberg Ingenieure GmbH), and Markus Ebbing (Klaus Stewering GmbH & Co. KG) for the professional insights and for the opportunity to visit this challenging infrastructure project.