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Why China’s Plan for a World-Spanning Super-Grid Is Unlikely to Happen
In vision and scale, the idea is mind-boggling: In response to an expected doubling of global demand for electricity over the next generation, China is proposing a super-grid — a grand, world-spanning, cross-border, centrally managed network of power generation. By 2070, it would deliver green-generated electricity to 80 countries, from the United States to Southeast Asia to Russia, Kuwait, Nigeria, and all points in between. The electricity would be moved across advanced power lines operating at an ultra-high 800 kilovolts, providing the umph to push the power thousands of miles while losing little capacity along the way. At strategic intersections and terminuses, the electricity would be channeled into gigantic stationary batteries for ladling off to customers when they need it.
Called the Global Energy Interconnection, or GEI, the super-grid would serve booming places that simply don’t have enough power, and places without any electricity. In doing so, it would help to fulfill a big piece of Belt and Road, through which Beijing hopes to link the global economy back to China, and achieve the same geopolitical power that the U.S. has through its control of commercial sea lanes, and that the 19th-century British did with its own fleet.
