- Plans to triple application fees and apply a price per feet of coastal cable installations have been announced by Oregon
- Oregon State planners believe the new structure could raise $1 million per new cable installed
- Protecting the coastline has become a political priority in recent years
Oregon has announced plans to introduce a payment structure for service providers that lay submarine cables off the Pacific state’s coast.
Currently, the low tax and zoning incentives offered make Oregon a particularly attractive location for tech companies including Microsoft and Amazon, and with large data centers (such as Google’s Dalles installation) requiring increasing data infrastructure, state officials believe a new pricing scheme is overdue.
The Oregon Department of State Lands is making the proposal, which seeks to completely restructure undersea cable pricing, which has been set at $5,000 since 2001.
Latest videos fromTechRadar
Even by tripling application fees, Oregon will still be a more affordable alternative for service providers upgrading or adding submarine cables than both California and Washington.
The payment structure being considered covers fees for applications and compensation “for subsea infrastructure located on submerged and submerged land within Oregon’s territorial waters.”
Currently, new filing fees are $5,000, with the proposed new fee set at $15,000. Renewal applications are set to rise from $5,000 to $7,500, with a new encroachment application fee also set at $7,500 (this describes any building or development on government-owned land that restricts its usual purpose).
Cables up to three inches in diameter have been assigned a basic annual fee of $3 per cable. ft., with wires charged at $7.
But how can these fees be applied to any new cable installations? Some calculations based on the Amazon Bitfrost cable project determined that a total of $1,450,380 would be paid over two decades, which would be funneled into Oregon’s Common School Fund.
These fees are a revision of an earlier, more expensive set of proposals, and while the Amazon Bitfrost project example may seem high, it is a literal drop in the ocean compared to the budgets required to lay cables across the Pacific Ocean – somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million.
Corporate responsibility
Oregon is also proposing new rules governing how much information companies submit in applications. This covers everything from decommissioning obsolete cables to outlining responses to earthquakes (such as an expected Cascadia Subduction Zone event, which is thought to be overdue).
Various challenges to how companies operate off the coast of Oregon have arisen in recent years, such as a Meta subsidiary attempting to install new cables at Tierra Del Mar in 2020. That abandoned project resulted in a pollution incident with 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid dumped into the ocean and a pair of sinkholes appearing the following year.
The fees are expected to be introduced in January 2027.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds.
