Many sectors in commercial shipping have welcomed new size records in recent years. So too, cable-layers, a segment suddenly in much demand with undersea infrastructure coming under multiple attacks across the world, especially in the Baltic and in Taiwan. Jan De Nul has just celebrated the launch of the William Thomson, one of two giant identical subsea cable‑laying vessels under construction in China. The sister ships have a cargo capacity of 28,000 tonnes and a length of 215 m. Sister vessel Fleeming Jenkin was launched in October 2025 and its delivery is scheduled for the last quarter of 2026. The William Thomson will follow shortly and will be operational in the first half of 2027. Jan De Nul’s two new cable-laying vessels have been specially built to install cables, both in shallow and ultra-deep waters down to 4,000 m. Thanks to their large loading capacity, they can take longer cables onboard in a single piece and bridge longer distances with as few subsea cable connections as possible. Compared to other cable-laying vessels on the market, they therefore also need to make fewer return trips to load cables. Their first project is the 2GW programme by TenneT, the grid operator for the Netherlands and large parts of Germany. This introduces a new generation of grid connections for offshore wind farms, each capable of transporting up to 2 GW. That is more than double the capacity of current connections, which typically range between 700 and 900 MW. By way of comparison, an average nuclear power station typically generates between 1 and 1.6 gigawatts. For this programme, Fleeming Jenkin and William Thomson will install more than 2,800 kilometres of 525 kV DC cables for four different grid connections. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1_95_0_1_2'); }); TagsThe Netherlands