Electricity is the brand new oil: London’s Energy Security Summit seeks a change within the world strategy | Economy | EUROtoday

The warfare in Ukraine was essentially the most extreme and evident warning concerning the want that Europe needed to rethink its vitality safety. And but, maybe it was one other episode, extra anecdotal however equally related, the one which greatest illustrated the place the weak level resides right this moment: the sudden failure of {an electrical} substation in London paralyzed the Heathrow airport, probably the most visitors on the planet, and prompted a chaos that took weeks to be solved.

The International Energy Agency (AIE), which arose in 1973 exactly to take care of the oil disaster of that 12 months, when the OPEC producing international locations declared an embargo on all of the allies of Israel, has summoned this week in London, along with the United Kingdom authorities, the summit on the way forward for vitality safety. It has been a modest starting, contaminated by the geopolitical uncertainty that has generated the arrival to energy within the United States of Donald Trump, together with his warfare declared to renewable energies and his no willingness to worldwide cooperation. The delegation despatched by Washington to the summit has been very low degree, and China has put an excuse of agenda issues to keep away from its presence within the British capital.

And even so, the summit is usually a key second to alter a historic strategy obsessive about fossil fuels, now that the best problem dealing with the world is the electrical energy provide. The IEA has circulated a preparatory confidential doc of the summit, which has summoned greater than sixty political leaders and the vitality sector, by which governments are pressing to transform “electrical security into a strategic priority of politics.”

“There are three gold rules to achieve energy security,” Fatih Birol, the IEA government director, defined to attendees. “The first is the diversification, both of the energy sources and of the countries that that energy is imported. The geopolitical situation can change, or any technical failure can cause serious problems,” he mentioned.

The different two gold guidelines, mentioned Birol, are predictability and cooperation. The first, as a result of a sector just like the vitality, which requires huge investments and really lengthy -term bets, can’t be topic to the continual alteration of the foundations of the sport that’s at the moment going down. And the second, as a result of “no country is an energy island,” mentioned the top of the IEA.

In truth, it has been the Spanish Minister of Ecological Transition, Sara Aaagesen, who has opted to defend the necessity for that worldwide cooperation, and needed to current Spain on the summit as a profitable mannequin. “This summit is fundamental because it shows that multilateralism is still completely alive and today Spain comes to tell its experience as a superpower in renewables, a country that has blunt results and the possibility of combining sustainability, security and competitiveness,” mentioned Aagesen.

Insatiable electrical energy demand

Since 2010, the demand for electrical energy on the planet has grown twice as a lot as the worldwide demand for all vitality. Electric automobiles, information facilities, synthetic intelligence programs … The new actors that strengthen the economic system right this moment have an insatiable urge for food of electrical energy.

The overwhelming majority of the provision enhance in recent times comes from renewable vitality (wind or photo voltaic), which by leaps and bounds change different conventional sources similar to nuclear reactors, hydroelectric, coal or mixed cycle.

But the IEA warns in its doc that the demand rising electrical energy, at any time and wherever, will trigger increasingly more rigidity in a producing system that is dependent upon the wind or the solar at the moment. “Systemic challenges will arise when balancing networks with predominance of renewable energies, in prolonged periods of low generation,” says the textual content. In different phrases, it supplies for the battle to entry the provision in moments of scarcity.

“Electrification is today unstoppable, and that means that it has become a issue of national security,” mentioned Ignacio Sánchez Galán, the chief president of Iberdrola (one of many official sponsoring firms of the summit). “We have to invest much more in transmission and distribution networks, to provide electricity to those new agents that are electronic vehicles or data centers.” The Spanish Executive has insisted on a requirement just like the one which had uncovered the Executive Director of the IEA. “Stability, predictability and principle of legality,” he claimed. “In order to mobilize all this great investment, we need a foreseeable regulatory framework. An unstable framework involves greater cost, and is unattractive for capital investment. You have to legislate to accelerate investment and avoid excessive litigation,” mentioned Sánchez Galán, which additionally presides over an vitality large within the United Kingdom similar to Scottish Power.

The Starmer Labor Government needs to simplify the planning and development of infrastructure, and a means of doing so is to place extra obstacles to the calls for of people, which lengthen for years any venture.

“When we talk about electricity, we often put the focus on nuclear plants, gas, wind farms or solar panels. But the main problems are emerging in the supply, how we move those electrons from production to consumers. And it is not just about high voltage networks. In many cases the large bottlenecks are in the last ten kilometers of the cable, from the substations to the houses, the houses,” Javier Blas, Bloomberg and Co -author analyst, together with Jack Farky, from the ebook The world is on the market: the hidden face of the uncooked materials enterprise (Ed. Peninsula). “The complexity of these networks is such that they are much more vulnerable to cyber attacks than oil or gas networks can be,” he provides.

The world has not completed understanding the teachings of Ukraine and the IEA needs the London Summit to start establishing new priorities and new approaches. “Oil and gas will continue to play an important role in the global energy system of the coming years, but the investment in clean energy is no longer only a climate imperative but an urgent imperative of national security,” mentioned British Minister of Energy Security, Ed Miliband, and the Executive Director of the IEA in a joint tribune revealed by the journal New Statesmanhours earlier than the beginning of the match.