Europe's power grid runs on the lines between its countries: interconnectors and HVDC

Luxembourg can import more electricity from its neighbours than all of its own power stations could produce. Cyprus cannot import any at all, because no cable reaches it. Most of Europe sits between those two extremes, and where exactly a country sits depends on a few dozen cables and lines at its borders. The European power grid is really a patchwork of national networks, each run by its own transmission operator, joined at the edges by interconnectors.

Those joints do two jobs. The first is trade. When Norway's reservoirs are full and German prices are high, power flows south through NordLink until the prices meet or the cable is full. Since 2014 more and more of Europe's day-ahead markets have been settled by one shared algorithm, which uses the spare capacity on every border to move electricity from cheap zones to expensive ones. The second job is security. A country short of power on a cold, windless evening can import it, and a grid that loses supply can lean on its neighbours to restart. The Iberian blackout of April 2025 showed what happens in one of the least connected corners of the continent.

The European Union measures this with a simple ratio: import capacity from EU neighbours against a country's own installed generation. The goal is at least 15% by 2030. On the Commission's January 2026 figures, 16 countries already meet it and nine are still below the older 10% mark. Spain, behind the Pyrenees, stands at about 3%. Ireland counts as zero, because both of its links run to Great Britain, which no longer counts. Its first direct cable to the EU, the Celtic Interconnector to Brittany, is due in 2028.

Geography decides what the link looks like. Across the North Sea, the Baltic and the Mediterranean, there is no choice but a cable. Of the 61 links on the map above, 52 run at least partly under the sea. Almost every long subsea link uses HVDC, high-voltage direct current, because an AC cable of that length would spend its capacity charging itself. On land the picture is more mixed. Some links are ordinary overhead lines, like the Aurora Line between Sweden and Finland. Others are buried DC cables where a new pylon route would never be approved, such as ALEGrO between Belgium and Germany and INELFE through the eastern Pyrenees.

The map counts 61 links in all. 47 of them cross a border; the rest join two parts of one country, such as the cables to Sardinia, Crete or Shetland, and they are built with the same technology. 11 are under construction now, and each one has its own page with its route, capacity, voltage, operator and the sources behind every figure.

The newer links grew out of years of research. Between 2014 and 2018 an EU-funded project called BEST PATHS ran five large demonstrations on exactly these questions: how offshore wind farms connect over HVDC, whether converters from rival makers can share one DC grid, how to renew an ageing multi-terminal link, how to get more out of existing overhead lines, and whether a superconducting cable could carry gigawatts. Its pages, news and events are kept here as a record, next to explainers on where each technology stands today and what has been built since the project ended in 2018.