Go global or go home

I know many of you thought that report on Africa’s proposed leapfrogging was bonkers. It is therefore with a heavy heart that I must now inform you that there are more bonkers things out there. Such as the idea of a global grid. As in, total interconnectedness between countries, regions, and, indeed, continents — to be powered by good old wind and solar.

It’s not often that I find it hard to believe the words appearing on the screen in front of my eyes but this is one of these cases. A group of people has suggested the world can — and should — go globally gridded. It will only cost a puny $117 trillion and yield three times the electricity that the world will need in 2050. Sorry, that’s three-point-one times the electricity demand in 2050. Accuracy matters.

Should you be in the mood to feast your eyes on the original study, here it is. From it, we learn that the $117 trillion to be spent on the global grid is 15.6% cheaper than a net-zero transition without a global grid, so there’s certainly food for thought right there, or rather, some sugar-stuffed energy drink for thought. I mean, 15.6% of trillions is billions. No small potatoes.

From the study we also learn that the idea behind it is pretty simple and rather familiar to us here. In fact, it’s so familiar you might feel an impulse to shed a tear of tedium. In short, the idea goes like this “Let’s build lots and lots of panels in sunny places and lots and lots of turbines in windy places and then wrap the planet in high-voltage lines to bring the electricity to demand centres.”

It’s kind of bad timing that just a day after the South China Morning Post published a copious report on the global grid paper the UK decided to not spend $34 billion on a transcontinental cable to bring solar power from Morocco to the Isles but what can you do. Some people just can’t think long-term. But the people from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Copenhagen, Columbia University, and Stanford who authored the paper are not among those myopic people.

They tell us, for instance, that “global interconnections has [sic] evolved from an idealistic vision to practical implementations at small scales”, citing cables between Spain and Morocco, and the Central American Electrical Interconnection System. Never mind that Spain and Morocco are 13 km apart at the narrowest point and those Central American countries with the interconnection system are, well, small. No, that doesn’t matter and the authors of the global grid paper tell us we can totally build interconnectors between the Americas and Africa. Also Asia and Europe. We can build interconnectors between everywhere and everywhere, because it’s important to stop everywhere from warming at twice the rate of everywhere else.

Then we hook the lines to all the turbines and panels, and enjoy generating lots and lots, and lots of electricity. To quote, “Our estimates suggest that the total electricity generation from global interconnectable solar-wind potential could reach a staggering level of [237.33 ± 1.95] × 10³ TWh/year.” I’ve no idea what the actual number is but it certainly looks massively, and by massively I mean staggeringly, impressive.

In fairness, the authors do not shy away from the problems, namely, geopolitics, national priorities, “managing cross-border regulatory differences and building trust in shared infrastructure,” per one of the lead authors. One problem that I couldn’t find a mention of, is the massive need for policing all these interconnectors. This will probably cost a few trillion, too, but that’s okay because we’ll save so much more from “optimized solar, wind, and storage deployments” that will go towards paying for those interconnectors, whose cost, by the way, is going to fall since obviously the cost of everything falls over time because it does.

Interestingly, the paper focuses on simple high-voltage lines rather than ultra-high lines because the former are cheaper. It does, however, allow for a future switch to ultra-high-voltage lines as suggested by an organisation that I hadn’t heard about until now, namely, the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization.

Based in Beijing and set up in 2016, GEIDCO is, in its own words, “a non-profit international organization dedicated to promoting the sustainable development of energy worldwide. The purpose of GEIDCO is to promote the establishment of a Global Energy Interconnection (GEI) system, to meet global power demand with clean and green alternatives, to implement the United Nations “Sustainable Energy for All” and climate change initiatives, and to serve the sustainable development of humanity.” Oh, look, the idea is not new at all. Who said turbocharged centralisation of control? It must have been me because I heard myself say it just now.

Compared to the idea of a global grid, the EU’s efforts to interconnect every member state seem cute. Yet it does provide a glimpse into how one version of the planet’s dystopian future would look — and what new and exciting levers for cross-border political manipulation and repression it would offer its enforcers. Luckily, it has as much of a chance of actually happening as the EU has of becoming a single country — at least in the next 30 years. Let’s take a moment to appreciate this luck.