Trio Of Nations Aims To Hook Asia Super Grid To Grids Of The World

Northeast Asia, the region encompassing China, South Korea, and Japan, has not yet gotten around to connecting its electricity grids together. But that’s not stopping these countries from promoting the Asia Super Grid, calculated to become the center of a global energy grid providing abundant, cheap electricity based on renewable energy. 

In Japan, the idea emerged following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster. The possibility of a nuclear disaster so shocked Masayoshi Son, founder and head of the telecom and Internet giant SoftBank Group, that he established the Renewable Energy Institute soon after to help develop and promote renewable energy.

“I was a total layman (in renewable energy) at the time of the earthquake,” Son told a packed audience attending a symposium celebrating the fifth anniversary of the institute in Tokyo last Friday.

Yet it was this naïveté that led the entrepreneur to go on and propose the Asia Super Grid to tap wind and solar energy in the Gobi Desert, estimated to be the equivalent of thousands of nuclear reactors. “People said it was crazy, too grand a scheme…politically impossible,” he added.

Nonetheless, entrepreneur Son found kindred spirits in South Korea’s state-owned Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO) and more recently in the State Grid Corporation of China and the Russian power company PSJC Rosseti. At an international conference on global energy interconnection in Beijing this March, the four entities signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to work together on interconnecting power grids to form the Asia Super Grid.

The idea gained further momentum with the establishment in Beijing in March of the nonprofit Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization. GEIDCO is led by Liu Zhenya, former chairman of State Grid. Members include the four Asia Super Grid signatories, as well