Back in July, I warned you that a Submarine Cable War was already raging beneath the waves. And its biggest victim would be renewable energy.
I hope you dumped your green stocks. And hid your cash in a coal mine. Because things are playing out exactly as anticipated…
The basic premise in July was simple. Just as the Germans shot themselves in the foot by relying on subsea pipelines to get Russian gas, the energy transition is making everyone dangerously reliant on submarine power cables.
The problem is, they’re rather easy to cut. Either “by mistake,” or deliberately without anyone knowing who did it. This creates some rather concerning incentives for geopolitical enemies. They can shut down entire nations without getting the blame…
Renewables’ reliance on subsea power cables is true in two dimensions. Firstly, there’s the obvious one. Offshore wind energy is reliant on subsea cables to move its power to the shore, where it can be used. Not that offshore wind facilities are built near a shoreline that actually needs them…
The second angle is more intriguing. The renewable energy-based green transition relies on the ability to shift power over long distances. The idea is that it may not be sunny or windy all the time in one place, but it’s always windy and sunny somewhere. If you build enough overcapacity everywhere, and enough infrastructure to move the power around, you can counter the intermittency of renewables.
There are some obvious flaws with this argument. Not to mention the fact that the infrastructure should have been built a decade ago. Before we phased out fossil fuel power plants.
But there’s one angle which got missed entirely.
The submarine power cables are rather easy to snip. And, crucially, it seems to be easy to get away with doing so.
All this was our story back in July. Which gave you one month to dump your wind and solar stocks. Because over the past three months, that story went well and truly mainstream…
Case in point
On Wednesday 10 October, an extraordinary LinkedIn post went viral everywhere except the mainstream media. It was written by Andreas Barnekov Thingvad PhD, aTrading Systems Director at Hybrid Greentech, which helps companies manage ‘energy storage intelligence’.
His LinkedIn post was about the failure of a high voltage direct current (HVDC) subsea cable between Norway and the UK:
‘Today we had the first GW-scale loss of consumption fault in the Nordic grid – that was not caused by the Nordlink HVDC (unlike the past 8 times where it was Nordlink).
‘This time it was another HVDC inter-connector – the 1400 MW North Sea Link (NSL) cable between NO2 and GB [Great Britain].
‘Today on the 8th of October at 09:47:58 CET a complete trip of the inter-connector made it instantly drop its export towards GB from 1400 MW to zero.
‘According to Statnett SF the reason for the unplanned fault is unknown.’
The failure wasn’t quite enough to trigger a blackout. Thanks to a vast amount of gas backup capacity still available in the UK…for now. But, as the UK’s Telegraph journalist Andrew Orlowski put it on his X account, ‘We just avoided a blackout earlier today. It was very close’.
Paul Homewood’s blog, Not a Lot of People Know That, pointed out how gas was ramped up to replace the missing power:
‘On this occasion, it was OCGT [open cycle gas turbines] which was quickly ramped up to cope with the outage’:
Homewood also added the obvious:
‘The more we rely on I/C [interconnector cables], the more we are vulnerable to these problems. And we won’t have gas power around to save us.’
The Telegraph’s Andrew Orlowski followed up on X:
‘We were very lucky to be able to call on gas at short notice.
‘But remember, we are nowhere near peak demand. We can only get through peak demand this winter by using interconnectors. When I wrote in the paper advising readers to “stock up on candles”, I was not joking.’
If the fault had happened at peak demand, say this winter, it may well have been lights out in the UK…
Or if two of the HVDC cables which the UK relies on had been severed at the same time, the country might’ve gone dark.
According to Thingvad’s LinkedIn post, these issues with Norway’s HVDC lines are common. He mentioned eight other similar events in the LinkedIn piece, which occurred with the other HVDC cable connecting the UK and Norway.
It was confirmation that the parts of the UK’s electricity grid which are supposed to provide energy security are actually a source of vulnerability and potentially even failure.
But notice the last part of Thingvad’s LinkedIn analysis:
‘According to Statnett SF, the reason for the unplanned fault is unknown.’
Because all of this raised an important question: is renewable energy an unacceptable national security risk?
And that was just the start of the submarine warfare campaign against renewables.
Energy security comes for renewables
In October, Deutsche Welle TV released a documentary that claimed Russian divers had been caught doing reconnaissance work on offshore wind installations in Germany. It’s in English and worth checking out if you want to know what’s going on.
On 17 November, two Baltic telecoms cables were cut. Then the plot of a Tom Clancy novel unfolded in the Baltic Sea as a Chinese vessel was chased down by various European navies.
In November, governments finally connected the vulnerabilities of subsea power cables to renewable energy specifically.
First Sweden rejected 13 offshore wind farm projects on national security grounds. The Guardian specifically mentioned Russian sabotage as a key concern:
‘Sweden scraps plans for 13 offshore windfarms over Russia security fears
‘A Nato maritime commander said earlier this year that the security of nearly a billion people across Europe and North America was under threat from Russian attempts to target the extensive vulnerabilities of underwater infrastructure, including windfarms, which he said had “system vulnerabilities”.
‘V Adm Didier Maleterre, the deputy commander of Nato’s allied maritime command (Marcom), told the Guardian in April: “We know the Russians have developed a lot of hybrid warfare under the sea to disrupt the European economy through cables, internet cables, pipelines. All of our economy under the sea is under threat.”’
This sent a global signal to renewables projects. And this month, Denmark’s large offshore wind farm auction went no bid…
Not to worry though. They’re planning another one for next year. On the 1 April…
The alternative is obvious
The Swedes have also figured out what we anticipated to follow all this in July. Here is a quote from Euronews in November which highlights how they plan to deal with the issue:
‘Sweden rejects applications for thirteen offshore wind farms, citing security concerns
‘The decision to reject the applications for wind farms has raised questions over how Sweden can meet its plans to double annual electricity production over the next two decades.
‘To achieve this, the Swedish government hopes to build out nuclear power. It aims to have an additional 2500 megawatts of nuclear power by 2035 and 10 new reactors a decade later, but critics say demand is expected to rise faster than new reactors can be built.’
The point is, our subsea cable predictions are playing out precisely as expected. The vulnerability of subsea infrastructure is now exposed. It has become a major international political issue. The impact on offshore wind and renewables generally is already being felt.
As is the obvious conclusion: to transition to nuclear instead of renewables.
There aren’t many governments left in the world trying to deny the obvious. Can you think of any?
Of course, should governments finally see the light and abandon their bizarre energy polices, it could trigger quite the resurgence in our economies. Especially in certain sectors. So, if you think the reckoning is imminent here in Australia, check out this briefing.
Regards,
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Nick Hubble,
Editor, Strategic Intelligence Australia
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