Laurent Segalen doesn’t do things by half. Whether accidentally inventing Scope 2 in the GHG protocol, landing an Irish Sea interconnector miles inland right to a big cluster of data centres, or seeing the potential to connect the power grids of Britain and North America, the Franco-British energy trader, investor, and host of Redefining Energy is in a league of his own.
In a Trump 2.0 world where international cooperation seems to be breaking down and even at Davos globalisation is gauche, Russian ships allegedly cutting connector cables between Estonia and Finland, and even the Norwegians threatening to cut electricity exports, is that an impossible dream?
Connecting grids makes more sense than ever. The technical challenge of moving power across huge distances without loss has been solved. Distributed renewables mean you need grids that are bigger than the weather. It’s politics - or geopolitics - that make the economically rational harder to realise. But then again, the politics of energy sometimes can surprise in positive ways.
For 40 years, France and the UK have been linked by an interconnector, moving electrons back and forth across the English Channel with very little fuss. French nuclear sends power one way, North Sea wind power heads back in the opposite direction. But amid all the truly dumb decisions made around Brexit, that cable has kept power flowing with very little fuss.
Yesterday The Economist published a piece pointing out that project was just a harbinger of what was to come. Singapore, without a lot of room for renewables, has given approval for cables connecting it with Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam and - some 4,300 km away – Australia.
Xlinks is developing an undersea cable connecting Moroccan solar with the UK grid. Europe has been building out cross-border connections for years, and the North Sea is basically an energy lake criss-crossed with a mesh of grid connections and offshore wind. Africa, Latin Amercia, South Asia, all sorts of other places are following the the same pattern.
And the Economist made a passing reference to an even more audacious project – connecting Britain with North America. The why is pretty intuitive — when it’s sunny or windy on one side of the Atlantic it’s likely to be a different thousands of kilometers away. And when demand for electricity is high on one side it’s likely to be lower on the other.
But could it really happen? There will be doubters. And these types of projects won’t be cheap. But when National Grid is making positive noises about it, and a new report looking at aspects of its feasibility written by the think tank Ember Energy, it doesn’t sound that daft.
And when we heard that Laurent Segalen was behind the project - named North Atlantic Transmission One (NATO-L) we started nagging Laurent to come on the show and tell not just the story behind the project but how his entire career has kind of led up to this.
After a week when much of what we hear is “we can’t” it is surely a good time to listen to someone who looks at how the world could be better and thinks, “why not?” And it doesn’t hurt if they have a decades-long track record of pulling off audacious projects.
Hope you enjoy.
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