Supergrids as logical path to regional integration
The Americas need something similar, to include folding in water management, to both leverage and protect our strategic advantage as the "OPEC of water/grain"
And yes, for those of you wondering, it is exactly these sorts of possibilities that drew me into working with Karen Fleckner and Artesion — applied geo-politics.
CLEAN TECHNICA: Southeast Asia Begins Building The Supergrid Of The Future
The opening graf is a beauty of a teaser:
On September 12, 2024, at 7 pm Central European Time, the day-ahead price for electricity in Norway was €5 per MWh. In Germany, it was €300 per MWh. Forbes suggests that if there were a more robust electrical grid in Europe, an idea some refer to as a supergrid, some of that cheap electricity in the north could have flowed south to give utility customers in Germany some relief from those high prices for electricity. The supergrid concept is gaining supporters around the world because renewable energy is altering traditional notions of how electricity is generated and consumed.
The old model is, we burn coal here, pump out the power, and distribute it across our grid. Pretty stiff, one-way arrangement not easily altered — much less contingency managed. Whatever the weather is, your answer remains the same, and you’re locked into it.
But, as electrical production grows more varied, why not mix and match as need be, seeking out the lowest prices at all times? Got plenty of sun? Go with that. Got more wind right now? Go with that. Hydro humming optimally right now? Go with that. Go with whatever is doing best at that moment.
Build that flexibility into your larger or super-grid, then make it all trade-able. Since water and power go together so much in industry and — by most accounts — constitute the long pole in the tent of our AI-enabled future economy (making chips, vast data server farms), why not combine your power and water management?
The grand strategic implications write themselves:
Having set a goal of being carbon neutral by 2060, China is committed to building the world’s largest supergrid. Using ultra high voltage power lines operating at 1.1 million volts, it will be able to transmit electricity generated from wind farms in central Mongolia, solar farms in the Gobi desert, and hydropower in the southwest to densely populated areas in the eastern parts of the country. By 2024, more than 30 UHV projects had been completed, connecting entire regions like Wuhan and Nanchang. But China’s vision doesn’t stop at its borders. It plans to extend the grid to other Northeast Asian countries including Japan, Korea, and Russia. Prioritizing the massive economic, ecological, and geo-strategic advantages, China has downplayed issues like environmental impact and land acquisition.
You want to know why China is profitably building infrastructure around the world? It’s because they’re leveraging all their national firms that have spent the past quarter-century working all of China’s vast infrastructure needs.
And guess what? The Chinese are still building out like crazy. The Chinese state, for example, is planning to add 150 nuclear reactors and up to 300 coal power plants to power its growing economy. Beijing is also investing more than $169 billion annually in its water infrastructure to support current and future industrial, agricultural, and residential needs, while laying the foundation for realizing ambitious Made in China 2025 and Industry 4.0 objectives.
As I have noted here before, America has a backlog of infrastructure modernization that it should be addressing.
The West feeds the Rest because the Americas are the OPEC of (first) water (relative to population) and thus (second) of grain. Our hemisphere and America in particular are incentivized to protect that water+power nexus throughout our shared continents (North, Central, South).
Trump 2.0 and SECSTATE Rubio in particular are promising a new hemispheric focus in our foreign policy and trade/development strategies. This is greatly needed, and yes, the Trump goes to Latin America (akin to Nixon goes to China) narratives write themselves: the arch-anti-immigration populist resets US relationships across its hemisphere.
Back to the CLEAN TECHNICA article, which then explores the advantages of high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines as a pillar of the supergrid approach.
Reading on, you begin to understand better how China is hard-wiring up Asia to a degree that the US will never come close to matching — unless we start thinking that much more ambitiously about the water+power nexus that is our hemisphere’s greatest strategic advantage.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step, according to a Chinese proverb. In Malaysia, that first step is a 30-kilometer long cable that connects the state of Surawak, which has abundant hydropower resources, with the state of Sabah. That interconnection is expected to begin operating by the middle of this year and could signal the beginning of a larger interconnection with Indonesian provinces and Brunei across the South China Sea. Such a regional supergrid would allow all 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to access renewable energy and accelerate their transition away from fossil fuels.
One has to ask: What is our version of this sort of infrastructure-driven integration with Latin America? Instead of trying to compete with China across Asia, why aren’t we focused on our own neighborhood?
American strategists look at this map and spot only maritime chokepoints. China clearly sees things differently, as does Australia — home to Sun Cable.
In America, Amazon gets it:
“If you can create opportunities for corporate investment in renewables and then the cross-border flow of power, that unlocks a whole bunch of opportunity,” said Ken Haig, regional head of energy and environmental policy at Amazon Web Services.
The positive integration — largely North-South in vectoring — thus logically appears:
Proponents of the ASEAN supergrid hope to see the type of market-based electricity trading that takes place in closely integrated Europe. That will be a challenge, since ASEAN is a diverse bloc that does not have an overarching executive body to impose regulations such as the European Union does. That leaves members to hammer out sub-regional deals to get anything done. Yet Southeast Asia has a strong desire for cleaner energy, which is giving it more reasons than ever to agree on new connections. Matthew Wittenstein, chief of energy connectivity at UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, told Bloomberg recently.“There is now a broader consensus among ASEAN states that they would all have something to gain. Historically, economics and security have been the primary drivers, but now the sustainability angle has really come in.”
Was America’s USAID ever involved in this sort of visionary stuff?
Yes, yes it [was].
The International Solar Alliance (ISA) had an MOU with USAID to establish and expand renewable energy transmission networks in South Asia, Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia, and Africa, in turn developing financial models to support trans-regional super grids.
USAID's Asia EDGE (Enhancing Development and Growth through Energy) initiative promoted digitization, regional energy connectivity, and the creation of regional and bilateral competitive energy markets.
South Asia Regional Energy Partnership (SAREP) program, implemented by USAID, explored how super/regional grids can facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources across the combined GCC/South Asia/ASEAN regions.
In Central Asia, USAID's Power the Future program accelerated the transition to energy-secure economies.
How much of this gets cut under Trump and Musk?
Probably all. But, have no fear, China is here, and there, and damn near everywhere.
CFR: U.S. Soft Power Is Spiraling in Asia, With China Filling the Void
No risk it, no biscuit.
Too many in the US think we can “beat” China over Taiwan, but, frankly, Taiwan is peanuts to Beijing’s larger ambitions. It’s a point of pride but it does not move the needle of China’s emerging global power as a market-making force.
This is where SECSTATE Rubio, I would argue, is correctly focused: all aspects of our foreign policy and development/trade policy should be mobilized comprehensively to advance US strategic interests abroad but particularly across our own hemisphere. We need to be resetting these relationships in the same comprehensive manner that China is accomplishing in Asia.
Otherwise, we’re losing this world-spanning competition with China.
Long-time China soft-power expert Joshua Kurlantzick:
My anecdotal interactions with a wide range of opinion leaders from the ten ASEAN states and Timor-Leste suggest that much of Southeast Asia was losing faith in the United States even beyond the Gaza war and before the Trump administration began to reduce aid …
They believe the United States will continue to fall behind the region’s trading trends and trade integration. They see the United States, which is experiencing democratic backsliding, preaching democratic reform to some countries like Myanmar and Cambodia while ignoring it in others like Vietnam, which is strategically important to Washington. Additionally, they increasingly view Chinese products, from electric cars to phones, as equal to or better than American ones and believe the United States is losing its technological advantages. This belief is evident in the rapid expansion of Chinese car makers into places like Thailand and Indonesia.
Many Southeast Asian opinion leaders do not understand the wild swings in U.S. policy positions from administration to administration, except a tiny handful who intensely follow U.S. domestic politics. Nor do they comprehend many of the issues that seemed strange to them to dominate U.S. politics (issues related to how courses are taught in U.S. higher education, bathroom rights) but which have little relevance in Southeast Asia and appear to undermine U.S. policymaking. U.S. culture increasingly seems to befuddle, too, with so much online U.S. discourse divorced from issues in their region and, sometimes, divorced from reality.
No shit.
It befuddles me most of the time too.
Meanwhile, since the super grid isn’t part of our domestic toolkit (yet), we undervalue its utility as a force for development and integration — two things China is intensely interested in achieving across the Global South.
America lacks a supergrid for a bunch of reasons. First, like our Union of states, separate grids arose on their own: the Eastern, Western, and Texas Interconnections, as they are known.
They break down further in the following subsets:
This fragmented structure has persisted due to the complexity and cost of integrating these large systems, with the Rocky Mountains proving to be the great barrier. There’s also the complex mix of federal, state, and local regs.
Oh, and there’s Texas, as usual.
With all that sunk cost, what would it take to create a supergrid?
You’d do it virtually, which is where Artesion, where I’m helping out, comes in.
US electrical grids could be unified in a virtual manner through the implementation of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), an approach that gains traction as a way to address our nation’s growing production, storage, and distribution challenges without requiring extensive infrastructure rebuilds.
VPPs are aggregations of distributed energy resources (DERs) such as smart appliances, rooftop solar with batteries, EVs and chargers, and commercial and industrial loads that balance electricity demand and supply and provide grid services like a traditional power plant.
There are something like 500 VPPs operating in the US today, but the scaling-up necessary to modernize and activate a true supergrid goes far and beyond that initial tranche.
A unified smart grid would significantly boost America’s energy efficiency by enabling real-time monitoring and management of energy usage, optimizing consumption and reducing waste. Breakdowns get detected earlier and addressed faster. The supergrid dynamically balances loads across regions. You can integrate renewable energy source with ease. Layer in AI on all of it and you just become that much more responsive to the real world on a minute-by-minute basis (AI as predictive machinery).
New models for new realities, as my buddy Steve DeAngelis likes to say, with increased cybersecurity being a hugely beneficial outcome.
The Internet of Things (IoT) meets the power grid, with VPP as their love child.
China got good at this at home, and now takes it to the world.
We won’t catch up until we make it happen here in the States, and we need American companies leading the way if we’re going to catch up at home or internationally.
Can the Tech Bros make this happen in Trump 2.0?
We shall see. But this is exactly the sort of breakthrough in managing our nation’s — and our hemisphere’s — natural resources that we need to pursue.
Left to its own devices, China will most definitely beggar our neighbors, leading to even more intense migratory pressures northward.
This is why making America great again has to expand to making the Americas great again.
In for a penny, in for a dollar.
