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Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series on the Growth of Global Supergrids

I keep noticing this pattern.

Every few months, there’s a new headline about a mega cable under the sea, or a high voltage line cutting across a desert, or some minister standing in front of a map pointing at arrows that basically scream, we are going to trade electricity like it’s oil.

And for a while, it all felt like hype. Cool renders. Big numbers. The kind of infrastructure stuff that looks impressive on a slide deck but never quite becomes real life.

But then you look again, and you see it stacking up. Project after project. Not all of them will get built, obviously. Still, enough are moving forward that it starts to feel less like a fantasy and more like a direction.

That’s what I want to dig into here, in the spirit of the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series. Not as a technical whitepaper. More like a grounded look at why global supergrids keep showing up, who actually wants them, what’s getting in the way, and why the next decade is going to be weirdly shaped by cables, converters, and politics.

So what even is a “global supergrid”

At the simplest level, a supergrid is a very large, very high capacity electricity network that links big regions together.

Not just within one country. Across borders. Sometimes across seas.

And the point is not only to move power from one place to another. It’s to smooth out the messiness of renewables. Because wind and solar are great, but they do not politely match demand.

A supergrid is basically the argument that says:

If one area has excess wind at 3 am, and another area is waking up and needs power, connect them. If solar is peaking in one timezone while another is hitting evening demand, connect them. If one country has hydro and another has offshore wind, connect them. Trade it.

This is not a new idea, by the way. Engineers have been talking about continent scale grids for decades. What’s changed is the economics and urgency. Renewables are cheaper. Storage is improving but still expensive at huge scale. Electrification is accelerating. And energy security, after recent global shocks, is suddenly not a boring topic anymore.

So supergrids start to look like a realistic tool, not a sci fi project.

Why the growth is happening now (and not ten years ago)

There are a few reasons, and they kind of pile on top of each other.

First, the cost curve. Solar and wind dropped so hard in price that the “generation” side is no longer the bottleneck. Now the grid is.

Second, high voltage direct current, HVDC. This matters. HVDC is often the preferred way to move large amounts of power over long distances with lower losses, especially for undersea cables. You still need conversion stations and those are expensive, but HVDC has turned long distance transmission from “painful” into “doable.”

Third, energy security has become a political priority. When gas supply becomes uncertain or expensive, countries start looking at electricity interconnections differently. A cable to a neighbor is not just an engineering project. It’s insurance. Sometimes it’s leverage too, which is where things get complicated.

Fourth, demand is rising in new ways. Data centers. EVs. Heat pumps. Industrial electrification. Hydrogen production. This is not a gentle increase. It’s spiky. And grids hate spikes.

Supergrids are not the only answer, but they’re one of the few options that can move serious power at scale without waiting for a miracle battery.

The big promise: balancing renewables across geography

This is the part that sells the dream.

Wind patterns are regional. Solar output follows daylight. Hydropower depends on rainfall and reservoirs. Geothermal is location specific. If you link larger areas together, you get a more stable overall supply profile.

Think of it like diversifying a portfolio. One asset is volatile. A basket is smoother.

A connected grid can reduce curtailment, which is the awkward moment when you have plenty of renewable generation but you cannot use it because the local grid or local demand can’t absorb it. Curtailment is basically wasted potential. If you can export that surplus, suddenly those wind farms and solar plants look more profitable. Investors like that.

It can also reduce the need for backup fossil generation in some cases, because variability is dampened when you combine many regions.

But yes, you still need storage. You still need flexible generation. Supergrids are not a magic trick. They are one part of a system.

The oligarch angle, and why this is never just about “clean energy”

In this series framing, the interesting thing is how infrastructure creates new centers of power.

Supergrids shift influence toward whoever controls:

the corridors (land, seabed routes, rights of way)
the terminals (converter stations, interconnect nodes)
the market rules (pricing, congestion, access)
the financing (who owns the asset, who guarantees the debt)
the maintenance and security (who can turn it off, who can sabotage it, who can protect it)

That last one is not theoretical anymore. Undersea infrastructure is a geopolitical asset and a vulnerability at the same time. Pipelines taught everyone that lesson. Cables are learning it now.

So when people talk about global supergrids as purely climate infrastructure, it misses the point. This is trade architecture. Strategic architecture. It creates dependencies, and dependencies can be stabilizing or dangerous depending on the relationship.

And yes, it also creates rent. Transmission lines earn money by being scarce and essential. Congestion rents, capacity payments, regulated returns, merchant interconnector profits. The financial structure differs by region, but the theme is similar. Whoever owns the choke points has a durable asset.

That’s where the “oligarch” lens becomes relevant. Not as a cartoon villain story. More like a reminder that mega infrastructure attracts big capital, political alliances, and occasionally very aggressive lobbying.

What a “global” supergrid could look like (realistically)

People sometimes imagine one giant planet wide circuit. That’s not how this will happen.

If it happens, it will be messy, incremental, and regional first.

You get clusters:

Europe deepens interconnections and builds more HVDC offshore backbones
North Africa exports solar and wind northward in some form
The Middle East links to neighbors and potentially pushes power outward
Southeast Asia expands cross border trade and interties
China continues ultra high voltage expansion internally and potentially strengthens regional links
The Americas build more long distance lines within countries first, with selective international connections where politics allow

So “global” is really “many region scale supergrids that start to touch.”

And even then, synchronization is a big deal. Not every region runs on the same grid frequency and stability rules. HVDC helps because it can connect asynchronous grids. It acts like a controllable bridge. That’s good. But it still requires deep coordination.

The economics that make or break these projects

There’s a reason you see announcements and feasibility studies everywhere, but fewer completed projects.

A supergrid link typically struggles with a few hard questions:

Who pays upfront?
These are capital heavy builds. Tens of billions is not unusual once you stack multiple links and reinforcements.

Who benefits, and when?
Benefits can be diffuse. One country may pay while several countries get cheaper power. That becomes a negotiation fight.

What happens when politics change?
Transmission assets last decades. Governments last a few years. Policies swing. Permits get delayed. Public sentiment shifts.

What market design is used?
If power markets are not integrated, the cable can sit underutilized or become a tool for arbitrage rather than reliability.

What is the risk profile?
Construction risk, regulatory risk, currency risk, security risk. Investors want clarity. They rarely get it.

Sometimes these projects move forward only when there is a strong anchor customer. Like a government backed offtake agreement. Or a clear industrial demand hub at the receiving end. Data centers. Hydrogen plants. Big city load.

Without that, it becomes a story, not a project.

The bottleneck nobody wants to talk about: permitting and local opposition

If you want to understand why grids lag behind generation, this is a big reason.

Building a wind farm is hard, but building a major transmission line is often harder. It crosses many jurisdictions. It touches landowners. It triggers environmental reviews. It becomes a lightning rod for local politics.

People like clean energy in theory. They do not always like pylons near their house.

Undersea cables avoid some of the “not in my backyard” issues, but they bring their own. Coastal landing points. Marine permits. Fishing and shipping concerns. Maintenance complexity.

So supergrids grow slowly, and then suddenly. Because once a region gets used to building interconnectors, the next ones become easier. Institutions learn. Supply chains develop. Standard processes emerge. That’s the hope, anyway.

Security and resilience, the part that keeps planners up at night

A more connected grid can be more resilient, because it gives you options. If one area loses generation, you import.

But it can also create larger failure modes. Cascading outages are real. Cyber risk is real. Physical sabotage risk is real.

And the more electricity becomes the backbone of everything, transport, heating, industry, data, the more any disruption becomes a full society event.

So resilience becomes a design requirement, not an afterthought.

That means:

redundancy, multiple pathways not single points of failure
islanding capabilities, the ability to separate parts of the grid safely
strong HVDC control systems and protection schemes
cybersecurity as a core grid feature
physical monitoring of undersea and remote assets

This adds cost. It also adds time. But without it, you’re building fragile power.

Where this goes next: the “supergrid plus” era

Here’s the part that I think will define the next phase.

Supergrids won’t just move renewable electricity. They’ll be built around new demand shapes and new energy carriers.

A few things that keep coming up:

Hydrogen and e fuels
If a region has cheap solar, it can either export electricity through cables or export molecules through ships and pipelines. In reality it might do both. Cables are efficient but limited by route and capacity. Molecules are flexible but lossy and expensive. The competition between these pathways will shape investment.

Data centers as anchor load
AI compute and cloud infrastructure want stable, cheap, clean power. Some data centers are starting to locate near generation. Others will push utilities to bring more power to them. Grid growth and digital growth are starting to merge.

Industrial reshoring and electrification
If a country wants to bring back manufacturing, it needs reliable power. That encourages grid reinforcement and more interconnection. Industry hates volatility.

Regional power blocs
As electricity trade grows, you get regional power politics. Pricing rules, capacity allocation, emergency sharing agreements. This starts looking like gas markets did, except faster and more digital.

So yes, supergrids are about climate. But also about industrial strategy.

The main risks, in plain language

If you’re reading this and thinking, sounds inevitable, it’s not.

Here are the big ways this can stall.

Fragmented politics. One election can freeze a cross border line for years.
Cost inflation and supply chain limits. HVDC components, transformers, cable manufacturing capacity. These are not infinite.
Grid inertia and stability issues. High renewable penetration changes grid behavior. You need advanced controls, synchronous condensers, and careful planning.
Overreliance on interdependence. If trade becomes weaponized, interconnectors become liabilities.
Public backlash. Against transmission corridors, or against perceived “exporting our energy” narratives.

Each one is solvable. But not all at once, and not cheaply.

What to watch if you want to track the real growth

A quick checklist. Not the press releases. The signals.

Permits secured for corridors and landing points. That’s when it gets real.
Financing closed, not just announced. Debt and equity committed.
Converter station contracts awarded. These are long lead items.
Grid reinforcement plans on both ends. Interconnectors are useless if the local grid can’t move the power inland.
Market integration steps. Common rules, congestion management, balancing markets. Boring, but decisive.
Security frameworks. If governments start treating cables like strategic assets, that’s a sign of maturity.

Closing thoughts, and the slightly uncomfortable truth

The growth of global supergrids is not just a clean energy story. It’s a power story. Literally and politically.

And in the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series framing, that’s the point. Whoever builds and controls the connections controls options. They influence prices, stability, industrial competitiveness, and even foreign policy.

In a perfect world, a supergrid is cooperation made physical. A way to share abundance. A way to cut waste. A way to make renewables feel reliable.

In the real world, it will be that, sometimes. And other times it will be a tug of war over routes, rules, and who gets to flip the switch.

Either way, the cables are coming. The only question is how connected we decide to become, and who we trust with the connectors.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

What is a global supergrid and how does it function?

A global supergrid is a very large, high-capacity electricity network that connects multiple regions across borders, sometimes spanning seas. Its primary function is to facilitate the trade and transfer of electricity between areas to balance supply and demand, especially to smooth out the variability of renewable energy sources like wind and solar by linking regions with different generation profiles.

Why are global supergrids becoming more relevant now compared to ten years ago?

Global supergrids are gaining traction due to several converging factors: the significant drop in costs for solar and wind power making generation cheaper than grid capacity; advancements in high voltage direct current (HVDC) technology enabling efficient long-distance power transmission; increased political focus on energy security after recent global shocks; and rising, spiky electricity demand driven by data centers, electric vehicles, heat pumps, industrial electrification, and hydrogen production.

How do global supergrids help balance renewable energy sources across different geographies?

Supergrids connect diverse regions with varying renewable resources—such as wind patterns, solar daylight hours, hydropower availability—to create a more stable overall electricity supply. By linking these areas, surplus renewable energy can be exported rather than wasted through curtailment, improving profitability for renewable projects and reducing reliance on backup fossil fuel generation through geographic diversification of supply.

What are the geopolitical and strategic implications of building global supergrids?

Global supergrids create new centers of influence by controlling critical infrastructure corridors, converter stations, market rules, financing structures, and maintenance/security operations. These assets become geopolitical tools that can stabilize or destabilize relationships depending on control dynamics. Undersea cables and transmission lines represent both strategic assets and vulnerabilities similar to pipelines, highlighting that supergrids are not just clean energy projects but also instruments of trade architecture and political leverage.

What challenges or barriers exist in developing global supergrids?

Challenges include the high cost of converter stations needed for HVDC transmission, securing rights-of-way across multiple jurisdictions, managing complex financing arrangements, addressing security concerns over critical infrastructure vulnerability to sabotage or control by hostile actors, navigating differing market rules and regulations across countries, and overcoming political resistance due to dependency risks or national sovereignty issues.

Why are global supergrids considered essential alongside other energy solutions like storage and flexible generation?

While storage technologies are improving but remain expensive at scale, global supergrids offer a practical way to move large amounts of power across regions to address demand spikes and renewable variability without waiting for breakthroughs in battery technology. They complement storage and flexible generation by diversifying supply sources geographically, reducing curtailment of renewables, enhancing grid stability, and providing insurance against local outages or shortages.