Comment by HPsquared
2 days ago
Any country relying on international cables for electricity would need to build and maintain full local backup power capacity. The combined cost of cables + backup may be more than storage cost. (Of course there are many factors which affect all these costs)
You might say "any country relying on international pipelines for gas would need to build and maintain full local backup capacity", except they didn't. Hence the Russia/Ukraine war causing all sorts of problems.
To be fair, many countries have several months worth of gas reserves.
==the Russia/Ukraine war causing all sorts of problems.==
Problems, yes. Catastrophes, no. It's not clear that they "needed" full backup capacity.
"Full capacity" backup looks different when you have sufficient batteries on the grid. Building enough backup generation to hit peak capacity would entail a lot more gas plants than building enough to hit average capacity and using batteries to supply the peaks.
Most states have sizeable underground gas storages, often reusing old oil and gas fields. The capacity being from weeks to months of normal use, possibly much longer with some rationing. This mostly turned out to be sufficient to enable a quick switch to LNG and other sources.
> maintain full local backup power capacity.
Not necessarily. If connectivity is broad and the network graph is decentralized, rerouting should cover some of the backup.
For example, if Luxembourg goes to war with Belgium, and Belgium shuts down the lines to Luxembourg, then they can reroute via Germany or France (provided they have lines there, obv). But if Spain gets beef with France, and France cuts the lines, they cannot easily reroute. So Spain would need more backup and more independence (and prolly cables to Italy and Africa?). Point being:
It helps to have stable bi-lateral relationships between countries that choose to connect their grids and economies. This kind of stability is a good thing. The current instability with long relationships being questioned and falling apart is a bad thing. And where you say cost, I say investment. Because energy is a valuable commodity and being able to buy/sell energy via cables has value.
Most renewable energy investments have decent, easy to calculate returns on investment. That's why this stuff is so popular with investors. And that's also why I don't think current policy changes in the US matter long term. It just slightly increases the time to a return on investment. But you still get a return. So, companies will continue to look at batteries, solar, and indeed cables with or without government support. And even a little bit of tariffs (aka. taxes) won't stop that.
Recent history is a very, very good reminder that political relationships between countries (or more generally political powers) are extremely fragile and the only reliable constant in these kinds of systems is change and stability isn't permanent, unfortunately.
Even the EU with it's very tight integration between member states is seeing a lot of pressure to tear itself apart again from the inside, despite the very real costs thĺis would bring.
Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands are all part of the European Union. Would you make the same claim if we were talking about US states? (With Texas being a special exception)
Norway is member of the European Economic Area, not of the European Union, together with Iceland and Liechtenstein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area
It's a risk management thing. "Can a trade dispute or undersea 'accident' lead to mass blackouts?"
There is one error there, Norway is not in the EU