Sea Link is a National Grid electricity network reinforcement scheme connecting East Anglia to the Southeast via an offshore cable between Suffolk (Sizewell area) and Kent (Richborough). The project is part of infrastructure upgrades needed to accommodate the zero-carbon electricity generated by new offshore wind farms.

EuroLink is a proposed interconnector cable between the UK (Sizewell area) and Netherlands that would allow electricity to be transferred between Europe and the UK.

There are significant environmental constraints on the Suffolk Coast, where much of the coast is protected by national and/or international designations for wildlife and many of the habitats and species they support are of high conservation value and sensitive to development activities.

Decades of offshore windfarm development off the coast of Suffolk have created a legacy of onshore infrastructure, including cables to carry electricity into the National Grid, which further constrain the options for where new cables can be brought onshore (landfall locations) and routed to avoid damaging the extensive network of designated sites and nature reserves.

This part of the Suffolk Coast is home to designated wildlife sites of national and international importance for nature, and which benefit local people and the economy. The Sea Link and EuroLink schemes have failed to avoid these precious places with any of the landfall sites or cable route options they are consulting on.

Any of the options on the table would have unacceptable impacts on wildlife.

Bringing the cables onshore at the landfall sites would involve large construction areas on the coast. The extent and nature of this construction is unclear from National Grid’s consultations.

Nature reserves including Suffolk Wildlife Trust’s Darsham Marshes reserve are potentially at risk, and the emerging preference for both schemes would take them through RSPB North Warren, a coastal wetland nature reserve and part of Leiston-Aldeburgh SSSI.

Even should the technique of Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) be proposed to avoid the need for trenching to install the cables, the impact on wildlife will be significant. Ground conditions could mean that HDD will not be possible, with open cut trenching the only fallback. This could result in even more damage to sensitive habitats and wildlife.

Potentially the least damaging option being considered for the Eurolink cable route would involve going through part of an internationally designated wildlife site, the Sandlings Special Protection Area, which is home to 10% of Great Britain’s entire breeding population of woodlark.

Failure to assess alternatives

National Grid have failed to properly assess the environmental impacts of alternative options for the Sea Link and EuroLink schemes that could avoid or significantly reduce the negative impacts on wildlife.

The selection of the Suffolk Coast in the Sizewell area connection point for Sea Link, for instance, was confirmed in National Grid’s 2020/21 Network Options Assessment, which states that it cannot evaluate the environmental impact of any option.

If there had been adequate strategic planning and consideration of environmental constraints, it is difficult to imagine that this part of the Suffolk Coast, with its extensive network of protected wildlife sites, would have been identified as the best option.

Inadequate consultation

National Grid’s consultation on the Sea Link and EuroLink schemes has not given people the chance to comment on the strategic options and alternatives considered, which were not properly assessed for their environmental impacts.

Now, National Grid is running two separate consultations on these schemes, which makes it much harder for people to understand the impacts and comment on the proposals, including the likelihood of cumulative impacts in combination with one another and with other major energy infrastructure proposals, including Sizewell C and another National Grid cable scheme, Nautilus.

We are calling on National Grid to carry out a strategic review of the alternative options for Sea Link and EuroLink, including an assessment of their relative environmental impacts, so that the least environmentally damaging solutions can be identified.

This should have happened in the first place but didn’t. Doing this now is the only way to prevent these schemes from causing avoidable and unnecessary harm to the precious and legally protected wildlife and habitats of the Suffolk Coast.

The UK and the world face twin climate and ecological emergencies that will have huge social, environmental, and economic costs unless we take urgent action now.

We recognise the need for and support the transition to renewable energy including offshore wind to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change – including impacts on wildlife – and we understand the need to upgrade National Grid infrastructure to meet future needs, including getting electricity to where it is needed.

Making the transition from fossil fuels to zero and low carbon energy sources is vital but must not come at the expense of the natural environment that underpins our societies and economies.

New energy infrastructure to support the transition to a net zero society must be planned, designed, and built with protecting and restoring biodiversity and natural ecosystems as an essential requirement.

There is significant support among local communities and MPs of constituencies affected by onshore electricity network infrastructure for putting this infrastructure offshore in the North Sea to reduce the impact on local communities.

Proposals for an ‘offshore ring main’ and ‘energy islands’ would involve significant construction in the marine environment, which is highly sensitive to development impacts and where mitigating and compensating for damage is difficult.

Any strategic review of the alternatives to Sea Link, EuroLink, and other electricity infrastructure that would affect protected wildlife on the Suffolk Coast must also consider potential impacts on wildlife and ecology in our seas. Otherwise, we risk doing even greater harm if our only concern is to put this infrastructure out of sight and out of mind.

We also need to understand the implications for wildlife and ecology on land of bundling the electricity from multiple offshore wind farms to bring it onshore in fewer locations, which could require much more extensive onshore infrastructure (converter stations and substations).

Brownfield sites that have been previously developed are, understandably, frequently proposed as popular alternatives to undeveloped sites for new electricity infrastructure. While the use of brownfield sites can reduce ecological impacts it is also true that previously developed land can itself become very important for rare and protected wildlife. It is not the case that ecological impacts will always be less on brownfield land and site-specific assessments should inform comparisons of alternatives.