Overview
- Litgrid disclosed Tuesday that the planned Gizai substation for the Harmony Link will use reinforced-concrete "sarcophagi," duplicate critical units, tunnel sensors, blast-capable fencing and artificial cooling to protect transformers from Shahed-style drones and sabotage.
- The Gizai site will sit about 30 km west of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave and serve as a key node linking the Baltic grids to the wider EU power system after the 2022 decoupling from the Russian grid.
- Lithuania will formally ask the European Union to pay at least half of the extra security costs, with Litgrid estimating the hardening measures add at least €48 million to the project budget.
- Intelligence warnings of deniable or gray-zone operations, recent NATO jet interceptions of a drone over Lithuania and national evacuation and contingency planning have driven the decision to harden frontier energy infrastructure.
- Poland has backed calls for greater EU cost-sharing, officials warn higher security bills could harm border-region competitiveness, and the move may set a new precedent for how the bloc funds infrastructure at exposed frontiers.