Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.

An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.

A €500 MILLION UK-Ireland interconnector project had to be rerouted to avoid the “grave” of a Harry Potter character.

Greenlink is a subsea and underground electricity interconnector linking EirGrid’s Great Island substation in Co Wexford to a UK National Grid substation in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Completed in February 2025, the route is around 160km submarine across the Irish Sea, with approximately 25km of route underground in Ireland and 5km underground in Wales.

The half a billion euro project however was rerouted because it was due to “go straight through Dobby’s grave”.

Dobby is an elf in Harry Potter and in one of the films, his death was filmed at Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire.

Harry Potter fans have erected a tribute to Dobby in the sand dunes of this beach.

Greenlink project manager Simon Ludlam told the Energy Revolution podcast that the cable was originally “going to go straight through” the tribute, which led to his company receiving “hundreds of calls”.

“Each project has its own challenges,” said Ludlam, “but some of them can be sort of mythical.”

He said the issues arose after he filmed a segment with BBC Wales explaining in “great, graphic detail” how the project would make landfall.

Ludlam filmed the segment on Freshwater West beach and explained that an underground cable would “go up into the dunes, and then right at the top of the dune, it exits and goes into the roads and off we go”.

“They aired it a couple of weeks later, and we got hundreds of calls,” said Ludlam.

Ludlam said he was too busy at the time to respond to the calls, but a colleague informed him that “we really have to respond to this”.

His colleague then explained that “apparently we’re going to go straight through Dobby’s grave”.

“I said, ‘Dobby, who’s Dobby?’ And they said, ‘well, Dobby in Harry Potter. You pointed out very clearly where his grave was, and that the cable’s going to go directly through it’.

“And I said, ‘well, he’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing’s fictitious, what are you talking about?’

“My colleague said ‘it’s very, very serious’, and it was serious.”

As a result, Ludlam went back to the planners to discuss “exactly how to reroute the cable so we wouldn’t go anywhere close to Dobby’s grave”.

“Actually, we went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains,” said Ludlam, “but we avoided Dobby’s grave.

“A lot of people were very happy about that, and the project’s now going, and Dobby’s happy.”

When asked about Harry Potter nearly “sinking a multi-million-pound interconnector project,” Ludlam replied that “you’ve got to be flexible, agile, and thoughtful”.

“Sometimes, you know what, a 10-year-old girl, she’s right.”

He added that “projects always have firsts, and it’s the first time we’ve moved for a fictitious character”.

To embed this post, copy the code below on your site