New Undersea Power Cables Could Carry Green Energy From Country to Country

What if across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, six high-voltage power cables stretched — each over 2,000 miles long.

CNN reports that a group of entrepreneurs 'wants to build what would be the world's largest subsea energy interconnector between continents, linking Europe and North America...to connect places like the United Kingdom's west with eastern Canada, and potentially New York with western France...

'The Europe-US cables could send 6 gigawatts of energy in both directions at the speed of light, said Laurent Segalen, founder of the London-based Megawatt-X renewable energy firm, who is also part of the trio proposing the transatlantic interconnector. That's equivalent to what six large-scale nuclear power plants can generate, transmitted in near-real time.'

The interconnector would send renewable energy both east and west, taking advantage of the sun's diurnal journey across the sky. 'When the sun is at its zenith, we probably have more power in Europe than we can really use,' said Simon Ludlam, founder and CEO of Etchea Energy, and one of the trio of Europeans leading the project. 'We've got wind and we've also got too much solar. That's a good time to send it to a demand center, like the East Coast of the United States. Five, six hours later, it's the zenith in the East Coast, and obviously, we in Europe have come back for dinner, and we get the reverse flow,' he added.

The transatlantic interconnector is still a proposal, but networks of green energy cables are starting to sprawl across the world's sea beds. They are fast becoming part of a global climate solution, transmitting large amounts of renewable energy to countries struggling to make the green transition alone. But they are also forging new relations that are reshaping the geopolitical map and shifting some of the world's energy wars down to the depths of the ocean...

Already, energy cables run between several countries in Europe, most of them allied neighbors. Not all of them carry renewable power exclusively — that's sometimes determined by what makes up each country's energy grid — âbut new ones are typically being built for a green energy future. The UK, where land space for power plants is limited, is already connected with Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark under the sea. It has signed up to a solar and wind link with Morocco to take advantage of the North African country's many hours of sunlight and strong trade winds that run across the equator. Similar proposals are popping up around the globe. A project called Sun Cable seeks to send solar power from sunny Australia, where land is abundant, to the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore, which also has plenty of sun but very little room for solar farms. India and Saudi Arabia plan to link their respective power grids via the Arabian Sea, part of a broader economic corridor plan to connect Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

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