EstLink reliability indicators are best in Elering’s history

The reliability of the Estonia-Finland electricity connection improved in the past year, reaching historically high levels for Elering in respect of both connections.

“Based on last year’s figures, it is possible to say that the direct-current connections are more reliable than a typical power station in ensuring security of supply for consumers. Therefore, in terms of ensuring security of supply, there is no difference for a consumer in Tallinn, for example, whether electricity comes from Narva or Olkiluoto. This has been one of the main aims in the creation of the joint Nordic-Baltic electricity market,” said chairman of the Elering board, Taavi Veskimägi.

During the past year, EstLink 2 was in operation for almost 96 per cent of the year’s hours. The same figure for 2015 was 91 per cent. During the whole of 2016, the connection was out of operation due to faults for only one outage, which lasted 1.5 hours. Planned outages lasted a total of 375 hours, or four per cent of the year’s hours.

“We were able to bring the reliability of EstLink 2 to a level for which we set the goal when creating the connection. Both sellers and consumers have been guaranteed access to the Nordic electricity market,” said Veskimägi.

EstLink 1 operated for more than 98 per cent of all hours last year. Planned maintenance work on the connection took around 103 hours, and faults took the connection out of service for a total of 22 hours.

A total of 3.1 terawatt-hours of electricity passed via EstLink 2 between Estonia and Finland in 2016, and the same figure for EstLink 1 totalled 0.7 terawatt-hours. The total capacity of the EstLink connections is 1000 megawatts.