♠ Posted by Emmanuel in
China,
Energy
at 4/04/2016 01:08:00 PM
 |
| The future? Linking not to a national grid but an international one. |
Adam Minter over at
Bloomberg has an interesting
article on how China's State Grid Corporation, the world's largest electricity supplier, is busy buying up energy assets all over the world. Apparently, it's all part of CEO Liu Zehnya's plans to eventually establish--get this--a global power grid. From an environmental standpoint, what's interesting is that it's designed to link producers of renewables to faraway customers in a way that has not been possible before when nearly all energy grids were, well, national:
China’s State Grid Corporation, the world’s biggest power company, is on an impressive buying binge. As Bloomberg News reports,
the company is “actively in bidding” for power assets in Australia,
hoping to add them to a portfolio of Italian, Brazilian, and Filipino
companies. The goal isn’t simply to invest, however. State Grid's
Chairman Liu Zhenya has a plan that he believes will stall global
warming, put millions of people to work and bring about world peace by
2050.
The idea is to connect these and other power grids to a global grid
that will draw electricity from windmills at the North Pole and vast
solar arrays in Africa’s deserts, and then distribute the power to all
corners of the world. Among other benefits, according to Liu, the system will produce “a community of common destiny for all mankind with blue skies and green land.”
It’s
a crazy idea, of course. And if this so-called Global Energy
Interconnection had been proposed by anyone other than the chairman of
the world’s wealthiest power company, it wouldn’t deserve much
consideration. But the $50 billion
in cash generated by State Grid last year gives the company the deep
pockets and political standing to put its priorities on the
international energy agenda.
Last September, no less than Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly called for talks on establishing a global grid, while leading research organizations -- including
the Argonne National Laboratory and the Edison Electrical Institute --
have participated in conferences looking at what would be needed to
establish one. And whether or not it’s ever built, the technologies that
underlie Liu's big idea are already changing how power will be
generated and transmitted in coming decades.
Things get tricky with the geopolitics, however. Nothing suggests that China would necessarily be a more reliable energy supplier than, say, Russia. Ask the Europeans about Russian "consistency" in the midst of various spats when energy is used as a
weapon. There is also the sheer cost of the whole infrastructure, which China alone cannot pay:
Technically, the vision is
plausible. Power is transmitted today further than ever before, and
smart grid technology is improving rapidly. But Liu’s vision faces
considerable geopolitical hurdles, including laws (in Japan, for
example) that prohibit importation of power from foreign countries.
Likewise, it seems unlikely that China will be able to convince the
nations who control the Arctic to open the region to Chinese energy
investments.
Then there’s the matter of cost. State Grid estimates
it would cost $50 trillion to develop a truly global grid. That would
require international buy-in over a period of decades. At a time when
short-termism and nationalism are rising worldwide, such a possibility
seems remote.
