Prysmian's Alessandro Volta enters sea trials: a 19,000-tonne cable layer aimed at the offshore grid bottleneck

Prysmian's new cable-laying vessel Alessandro Volta has entered sea trials off Norway, with both Prysmian and VARD reporting the milestone on 23 October 2026. The ship is the largest hull VARD has ever launched. More importantly, it is the physical expression of a strategic bet: that the binding constraint on the offshore-grid build-out is not cable manufacturing capacity but the ships needed to install it.

Where the project actually stands

The brief framing of this as an offshore-wind EPC project is a category error. There is no third-party EPC. The contractual chain is a turnkey design-and-build contract between Prysmian (owner and operator) and VARD, the Fincantieri subsidiary, with VARD's own equipment arms supplying much of the electrical and interior package and third-party OEMs supplying the mission gear. VARD announced the order on 22 November 2022 at approximately €200 million, with delivery initially targeted for Q1 2025.

That schedule has slipped by roughly two years. The sequence since:

One anomaly deserves attention: roughly a year will separate the start of sea trials from delivery. That is a long trials and commissioning window for a vessel of this type, though not unheard of for a first-of-class design with an extensive mission-equipment fit-out. Read literally, it implies either an unusually thorough trial programme or further schedule buffer already built into the 2027 date. The public record does not distinguish between the two.

The design grew, and that matters

The 2022 contract announcement described a ship of about 170 m with carousels of 7,000 t and 10,000 t. The delivered specification is materially larger:

• Length 192.8 m, beam 34 m, summer draught 8.4 m, deadweight 21,500 t
• Three carousels — 10,000 t aft, 10,000 t forward, 6,000 t below deck — for up to 19,000 t of cable
• DP3 dynamic positioning, bollard pull 220 t, speed above 16 knots, 90-day endurance, accommodation for 130
• 60 t tensioners, laying to 1,500 m water depth, bundled-cable and simultaneous lay-and-burial capability
• Mission deck gear: 100 t active-heave-compensated crane, 20 t crane, 85 t A-frame with 200 t AHC towing winch, two enclosed work-class ROV hangars, ~30 m × 8 m covered jointing area
• Battery hybrid: 3 MW energy storage, shore-power connection, SCR for NOx, biodiesel-ready generators

That is a VARD 9 18 design from Vard Design in Ålesund, distinct from the VARD 9 04 used for the earlier Monna Lisa and described by Prysmian as an evolution of that class. The capacity uplift over the 2022 spec is the interesting commercial fact: Prysmian designed this vessel in 2022 for a cable market it then watched grow fast enough that the first ship's specification was no longer the right one. Building bigger means fewer transits back to port, larger bundled lays and lower unit installation cost on the longest interconnector routes.

Why the fleet is the story

The Alessandro Volta is one of two ships in that ~€350 million programme. The second, a shallower-water unit around 167 m with 10,000 t capacity and eight-point mooring, targets different work. Prysmian already operates Leonardo da Vinci and, since February 2025, Monna Lisa — both also VARD-built, both with hulls from Tulcea and outfitting at Søviknes. The Søviknes line has effectively become a production system for Prysmian's fleet, which is a competitive asset in its own right.

Market framing from Hakan Ozmen, Prysmian's EVP for Projects, at the December 2023 announcement was that demand for submarine cable systems for interconnections and offshore wind "both in Europe and in the US" was growing tremendously. Three years on, that reads less like promotional language and more like a capacity constraint being relieved one hull at a time.

The installation tooling is being upgraded in parallel. SMD has delivered a heavy-duty power-cable plough designed to bury conventional, bundled two-pole and quad-bundle cables up to 5 m below seabed level, with the first of two units built for Monna Lisa and Alessandro Volta. Prysmian and SMD have since put a larger plough into operation for the same vessels.

The steel question

The structural steelwork for this ship is finished. Hull blocks were fabricated and erected at Vard Tulcea and the hull was launched in October 2025; primary shipbuilding steel procurement is complete and should not be read as an open opportunity. VARD has not published plate tonnage or disclosed supplier names for newbuild 970, and the shipyard's launch material references steel-outfitting work without quantifying it. Any figure put on the hull's steel content for this vessel is an estimate, not a disclosed fact.

The remaining steel content is in mission equipment — the A-frame, crane pedestals, carousel structures, tensioner frames and plough bodies — much of it supplied as finished fabrications by Palfinger and SMD rather than procured as plate by the yard. That work too is largely behind the project.

What remains genuinely forward-looking is speculative: a possible third vessel under the Prysmian fleet expansion and the ordinary maintenance and spares demand of a four-ship fleet operating for decades. Neither is evidenced as an open procurement package today.

What to watch

The commercially significant questions now are schedule and utilisation, not construction. Whether the Alessandro Volta enters commercial operation early in 2027 as planned, and whether a long trials window compresses into that date or signals further slippage, will determine how quickly Prysmian can convert ~€350 million of capital into installation capacity. For anyone tracking the subsea grid supply chain, the vessel's first major campaign — likely a long interconnector or a large offshore-wind export-cable package — will be the clearest signal of where that capacity is being pointed.