Shared grids, shared risks: Offshore wind interconnectors and North Sea energy security

Dan Marks, a research fellow for energy security at the Royal United Services Institute, said interconnection should be viewed through a security lens similar to collective defence treaties such as NATO. “Interconnection is not dissimilar from collective security, in that it does improve security overall but it comes at the cost of supporting each other,” he said. Marks argued that shared infrastructure could reduce the need for expensive backup capacity if designed correctly. “Interconnections pool risk, so if one country is impacted by a storm, outage or attack, it does not need to maintain lots of infrastructure in reserve, which is expensive, because it can draw on its neighbours,” he said. He contrasted this with the UK’s gas system, which remains concentrated around a limited number of assets. “The gas system has multiple single points of failure because it requires significant concentration around platforms, compressors, pipelines etc.,” he said. By contrast, offshore wind connected to multiple countries could be inherently more resilient. “Multiple interconnections make attack, particularly deniable attack, much more difficult, particularly if the projects have been designed to avoid single points of failure like substations and transformers,” Marks said.