Worldwide, over 3,000 gigawatts of renewable projects are waiting to be connected to the grid because there are no lines or existing grids are not powerful enough.¹ That’s about three times the total power plant capacity available in the EU. So regenerative generation has long since been around. What’s missing are the lines that bring the power to where it’s needed.

This challenge does not stop at national borders. In Germany, the share of renewable energies in domestic grid feed-in is currently around 60 percent.¹ More and more countries are thinking bigger about the next step: across countries and even continents. This mission statement is called “Global Grids”. At klimaVest, we are monitoring the development closely, as it directly affects the backbone of the energy transition.

What are global grids?

The term describes an idea that includes several stages. At the beginning are the national transmission networks, such as the Amprion company in Germany, in which our klimaVest fund holds an indirect stake. This is the basis for cross-border connections, so-called interconnectors, which connect neighbouring networks. The most far-reaching stage is cross-continental alliances that connect generation regions and consumption centres over thousands of kilometres.

The international vision behind this is called the “Green Grids Initiative - One Sun, One World, One Grid”. The project was launched in 2021 at the World Climate Conference in Glasgow, India and the UK.² The guiding principle: The sun never goes down. Somewhere on earth it always shines and somewhere there’s always wind. By connecting these sources across time zones, you can direct electricity to places where it is dark or weak. So much for the theory. It becomes exciting to see what global grids can do and where their limits lie.