Ross Clark Ross Clark

Europe’s looming energy wars

Could this be our next fight with Brussels?

This summer marks a truce. But if, as expected, Liz Truss becomes prime minister, it is almost inevitable that tensions over the Northern Ireland protocol will resurface. Britain has been threatened with trade barriers if it tears up the protocol, with implications for import and export industries. But one possible consequence has been largely overlooked, in spite of the gathering energy crisis: the trade in gas and electricity.

Imported power via undersea interconnectors is the forgotten but fast-growing element of our electricity system. In 2019, 6.1 per cent of our electricity was imported. Undersea power interconnectors, which have been a feature of the UK electricity system since 1986 when the first one plugged Britain into France’s national grid, are designed to work in both directions. They allow, for example, the UK to buy cheap French electricity when there is surplus generation in France and vice versa. In recent years, the electricity has tended to flow predominantly in one direction: towards Britain. In 2019, Britain sold 0.7 TWh of electricity to France and imported 11.9 TWh from it. For the Netherlands, the corresponding figures were 0.3 TWh and 11.1 TWh and for Belgium 0.1 TWh and 5.1 TWh.

However, in recent months, the current has been flowing mainly in the opposite direction. Britain has been supplying a lot of energy to France, many of whose nuclear reactors have been out of action. Sometimes, half of the country’s 56 nuclear plants have been offline for maintenance. At 4 p.m. this afternoon, for example, 3.7 per cent of UK energy supply was being exported – thanks in part to surplus solar energy. It is a similar story with gas. Until recently, the UK was a net importer of gas via pipelines between Norfolk, Belgium and the Netherlands.

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