Azerbaijan-Hungary HVDC interconnector

[AE-NMidlands]

Don’t know if the feeling is the same throughout the old satellite states, but I can hazard at a guess.

(Sorry, still off-topic...) We went to post-Soviet Latvia 15 or maybe 20 years ago. I had learnt Russian at evening class as an ex-Yugoslav neighbour had told us not to bother with Serbo-Croat, but stick with the lingua franca of the eastern block after we had had several nice holidays in Yugoslavia and were planning to visit and explore more.

Nobody there (in Latvia) would admit to speaking or understanding any Russian at all - except an old woman conductor on a tram who was delighted when I asked for our tickets using Russian numbers by accident!
(Also a few years later in deepest SE rural Bulgaria we attracted attention in a small bar when I read out the rolling Cyrillic TV headlines to my wife so that she could hear the words and guess what they meant - I couldn't translate at the same time!)
A

[Bugtownboy]

Totally agree dan_b.

Hopefully the proposed interconnector gives greater power independence from Russia to previous satellite states.

Accepting there is always going to be a risk of attack on any aspect of infrastructure.

[Mr Gus]

Lost me there Gus, thought Kaliningrad was their aircraft carrier on the south Baltic ?

It's sandwiched between Poland & Lithuania, used to belong to Germany till ceded as part if the eastern bloc, after w.w.2 & is russias major ice free port , so is strategically very important to russia & a complete pita for the nearby countries, especially with belarus nearby as putins b1tch.

https://i0.wp.com/baltic-review.com/sto ... .jpg?ssl=1

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaliningrad

If anyone looks on flight radar24 you will see commercial planes going back & forth, as an entry point into europe.
A great port from which to spy / blow up interconnectors via, or send a rapid raiding force from, etc etc, if we are talking maintaining the need to buy gas from russia.


Is this EU interconnect a private project proposal or with EU money? , wonder who would underwrite that.
(is there an EU 20 year interconnect plan? would be interesting to see the whole supply picture across diplomatically friendly countries)

[dan_b]

No idea about the funding for this proposal - and I don't know anything about the ownership of the National Grids and Electricity Generators in those 4 countries. Would well imagine it'll be state-funded and backed by an EU Grant though, but that's just my hunch.

In 2014, The European Commission set an interconnection target of at least 10% by 2020 and 15% by 2030 - ie each EU country should have the capacity to transporting at least 10% of domestic electricity produced to neighbouring countries.

In 2021 announced that 16 countries reported being on track to reach that target by 2030, or have already reached the target. Not sure which, but would imagine France is in the lead!

The EU does invest in critical infrastructure like this through their "Common Interest" fund - indeed quite a few of the UK's HVDCs received funding this way before we did the Brexit. The European Investment Bank has also funded HVDC construction across the Bloc, including for example the NordLink between Norway and Germany, and the Euro-Asia HVDC project which will link Cyprus and Greece to the Israeli grids via a 2GW HVDC connector.