Somewhere in Britain, someone is about to put the kettle on.

They will not think about where the electricity comes from. They rarely do. But very soon, the power flowing through that kettle in Manchester or Birmingham or London will have travelled hundreds of miles from a wind farm off the Scottish coast, through a cable laid on the bottom of the North Sea.

That is the ambition of Eastern Green Link 4.

On 30 March 2026, a £2 billion contract was signed to build it. A subsea cable that will run 640 kilometres from Fife in Scotland to Norfolk in England, mostly along the sea bed. When it is switched on in 2033, it will carry two gigawatts of clean electricity, enough for around two million homes. It is one of five Eastern Green Links being built along Britain's east coast, a joint effort between SP Energy Networks and National Grid Electricity Transmission. Together they form a new electrical backbone, the largest expansion of Britain's transmission network since the postwar era.

This is infrastructure on a Brunel scale. And it is being built by British hands.

Siemens Energy will build the converter stations at Fife and Norfolk, the engineering miracles that turn alternating current into direct current, the most efficient way to move huge volumes of electricity across long distances. Siemens employs more than 7,000 people across the UK including at its centre of excellence in Manchester. Prysmian, already contracted for £2 billion, is supplying the cable itself. 1,200 employees across Britain. A marine base at the Port of Middlesbrough. More than a hundred British suppliers working alongside them, 40% of them in the North East.

Real British jobs. Real British engineering. Real British ambition. This is the supply chain of the energy transition being built in real time.

When National Grid came to sign this £2 billion contract they reached for a British made Conway Stewart pen designed for the occasion. Hand made in Emsworth, Hampshire, the barrel design replicates the actual cable sheath used on the Prysmian subsea cable. A quiet tribute to this amazing infrastructure project that with the stroke of the pen has become a reality.

Conway Stewart has been making pens by hand in England since 1905. We were founded when Britain was powered almost entirely by coal. We have written through the nationalisation of electricity, the North Sea oil boom, the dash for gas, and now the clean energy transition. The country around us has changed but the contract signing has not; ink, pen and signatures are all still required whatever the size of the project.

Eastern Green Link 4 is infrastructure in the Brunel tradition.

British infrastructure, signed with a British pen. That feels exactly right.

Read National Grid's press release here.