The National Grid, a privately owned company listed on the stock market, owns the main national pipes and pylons in England and Wales but also has stakes in two interconnector power links with the continent with plans to build many more.
For a fully renewable pan‐European power system with zero interconnector capacities, the required backup energy decreases from 24%% of the annual electricity consumption down to 15 % with sufficiently large transmission capacities which permit unconstrained power exchange.
In the proposed model, two main interconnectors of gas and power systems are load centers and gas-fired power generation (GPG), which are denoted by (8) and (16).
There are currently plans for up to five new interconnectors from Norway to the EU to be built by 2020, with a capacity of up to 5GW (providing 5GW from gas plants would take around 10bcm a year).
There are two existing international "interconnector" cables from Britain, to France and the Netherlands, but nine more are either in construction, in formal planning or undergoing feasibility studies.
That may be good news for some cheaper, rival projects, such as the BP-backed South East European Pipeline (which unlike Nabucco mostly uses existing infrastructure) and two smaller projects, the Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy (ITGI) and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP).
There is a 275 kV double circuit interconnector and two standby 110 kV lines between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Even at a national level, designing policies for electricity markets is an extremely complex task; but this is exacerbated in the case of market coupling, since different policies may be applied at the two ends of an interconnector.
A technical fault at the UK-Belgian interconnector, one of the UK's biggest import pipelines, forced the shutdown.
Last Friday's temporary closure of the UK-Belgian Interconnector, one of the country's biggest import pipelines, pushed prices to an all-time high and sparked fears the nation could run out of gas.
