At first glance, the seas are an empty landscape. Under its waters, the image is another, through it a network of invisible highways that already support our day to day: the submarine cables that carry the 99% of world communications. Now, a new generation of electrical interconnectors – thousands of kilometers and gigavatio power – aspires to bring sun, wind and hydraulic where they are missing, when they are missing. The promise is simple: that electricity travels with the sun and wind through schedules; The execution, not so much.
The starting point: The North Sea. The United Kingdom and Denmark premiered at the end of 2023 the Viking Link, a 765 km cable that crosses the North Sea and allows you to import electricity when wind is missing on the island and export when left over. It is the longest interconnector in the world in operation, but, as Financial Times warned: “It may not be for a long time.”
The British media report details That on the horizon there are much more ambitious plans: join Canada with the United Kingdom and Ireland through a 4,000 km cable, link Morocco with Europe or export Australian solar energy to Singapore through more than 4,300 km of submarine cable.
Through the cables. This new megaproject makes it clear that countries have been pursuing a connection with renewables for some time, because there is a mismatch between production and consumption, and we must solve it.
The most illustrative example is AapowerLink in Australia. The Suncable company plans to install 3 GW from Solar in the northern territory, store part in batteries and sell it both to Darwin and Singapore, through an underwater cable of more than 4,000 km. In the words of his CEO, Ryan Willemsen-Bell, collected by Financial Times: “Australia has abundant land and sun. The ability to share those benefits with our neighbors has enormous potential.”
In parallel, the North Atlantic Transmission One Link seeks to connect the Canadian hydroelectric plant with Europe. The time differential is its great asset: when Canada sleeps, the United Kingdom starts the day; When in the North Sea, wind blows at midnight, New York is preparing dinner.
A lesson from the Internet. The idea may sound futuristic, but there are already solid precedents. As we have underlined Xatakathe entire planet is furrowed by submarine data cables, authentic digital highways that have demonstrated the viability of infrastructure of tens of thousands of kilometers.
The Southern Cross Cable Network, 30,500 km, connects Australia, New Zealand and the United States since 2000. The newly opened 2Africa, 45,000 km, surrounds the African continent and reaches Barcelona and India. And in Spain, cables such as tide (6,605 km, Meta and Microsoft) or Grace Hopper (7,191 km, from Google) link Bilbao with the east coast of the US. The experience of these data networks provides an obvious parallelism: if we already move information on a global scale, why not also clean energy?
Although not everything is so easy. From Financial Times alert a tensioning supply chain: The manufacture of cables, transformers and converting stations does not supply. The waiting deadlines are lengthened, and the availability of specialized ships to tend cable is limited.
To that are added political risks. In Norway, the export of electricity to its neighbors has triggered the internal debate on prices. In the United Kingdom, the Government rejected this year to support the X-Links project to bring energy from Morocco, claiming “high level of inherent risk”. And with the ongoing Ukraine War, the threat of sabotages to critical infrastructure It is a fact.
Looking inside. In the Spanish case, the problem is more domestic than international. As we have explained in Xatakathe country has run more than anyone to lift renewables in the “emptied Spain”, but has not deployed the cables to bring that electricity to the cities.
The result is a “broken bridge”: at noon there are plenty of cheap megawatts that are cut or sell at zero price, and at night the network needs gas support, more expensive the market. According to data from the AELēC employer, 83.4% of connection knots are already saturated, which prevents hooking new consumptions such as industries, data centers or electrolyiners. The challenge, in short, is not to plan and reinforce the networks; as well as improve interdependence with other countries to break With the French bottleneck.
A map of interdependencies. Beyond the technical and economic, these electric highways draw a new geopolitical map. Just as pipelines and gas pipelines marked the twentieth century, renewable interconnections can define alliances and dependencies in the XXI.
The engineer Simon Ludlam, co-founder of the Canada-UK project, summed it up in Financial Times: “The most important nuclear reactor is in heaven, and its energy can be shared thanks to the rotation of the earth. But we need to be interconnected.”
The sun that shines in the Australian desert or the water that falls in Canada could light, in a matter of seconds, the lights of cities to thousands of kilometers. The energy transition not only depends on producing renewables, but also on learning to move them. If the pipelines defined the petroleum geopolitics, the electric highways can become the invisible arteries of the coming world.
Image | Unspash and What’s Inside
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