Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series Oligarchy and the Emergence of Intercontinental Electricity Networks

You can feel it coming, honestly.

Not in a sci fi way. More like the slow, practical kind of “coming” where one day you realize your phone can roam across countries without thinking about it, your money can move instantly, your work can be done from anywhere. And then you look at electricity, the thing that still mostly behaves like it is stuck inside national borders, and you go… wait. Why is this still so local?

This is part of what I want to explore in this Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series piece. Not just the engineering of intercontinental electricity networks, but the power. The social power. The political power. And the very specific kind of economic power that forms around infrastructure when it gets big enough to matter.

Because if an intercontinental grid really arrives in a meaningful way, it will not just be a climate story or a “modernization” story.

It will be an oligarchy story, too.

The dream is simple. The reality is not.

The dream is seductive: connect continents with high voltage transmission, move electricity from where it is abundant to where it is scarce, smooth out peaks and valleys in demand, and use time zones like a cheat code. When it is night in one place and solar is off, it is day somewhere else. When wind dies down in one region, it is roaring in another.

You get reliability. You get efficiency. You get a faster path to decarbonization.

You also get something else. A new layer of dependency.

Electricity is not like oil in one key way: it is instant. It is continuous. And when it fails, everything else fails with it. Payments, logistics, hospitals, water systems, heat, cooling, data centers, trains, traffic lights. All of it.

So when people talk about intercontinental electricity networks, I always want to ask a blunt question.

Who gets to hold the switch?

Not literally, maybe. But functionally.

Intercontinental grids create a new kind of “strategic asset”

Countries already treat energy as strategic. We have seen it play out over and over. Pipelines, LNG terminals, shipping lanes. But electricity networks are even more intimate, because they plug directly into daily life. They do not arrive as a tanker you can reroute. They arrive as stability. Or instability.

As interconnectors scale up, they become strategic assets in three ways.

First, they shape price. If you can push large volumes of power across borders, you can influence wholesale markets, arbitrage differences, and effectively tax regions that have fewer alternatives.

Second, they shape industrial competitiveness. Cheap reliable power becomes a magnet. Expensive volatile power becomes a slow bleed. Aluminum smelters, hydrogen projects, data centers, semiconductor plants. They will chase the grid.

Third, they shape political leverage. Not always through dramatic “cutoffs”. Sometimes it is subtler. Contract terms. Capacity allocation. Maintenance schedules. Congestion management. Priority access during stress events.

That’s where oligarch style structures start to matter. Because oligarchy, in the broad sense, is not only about having money. It is about being positioned between the public and a resource they cannot live without.

Oligarchy does not always look like a villain. Sometimes it looks like a “builder”.

This is the tricky part. A lot of the people who end up at the center of infrastructure empires do not show up saying, “Hi, I would like to capture your grid.”

They show up as problem solvers.

They show up with capital when governments are strained. They show up with speed when bureaucracies drag. They show up with relationships when permitting is chaotic. And they show up with a narrative, usually a good one: jobs, security, green transition, national prestige.

And to be fair, sometimes they do build real things—big things, useful things.

However, the structure that forms around these developments can still become oligarchic; meaning a small group gains outsized control over an essential system and then writes rules that preserve their position.

Intercontinental electricity networks are particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon due to their scale and complexity which creates an environment ripe for oligarchic structures.

Why intercontinental networks are so hard to build (and why that concentrates power)

It is easy to underestimate the friction here, so let’s slow down.

To connect continents with meaningful capacity you need some combination of:

• High voltage direct current lines, usually HVDC, because long distance AC transmission is a mess
• Converter stations that are expensive, specialized, and not quick to build
• Undersea cables if you are crossing oceans or seas, which introduces its own supply chain constraints
• Grid reinforcement on both ends, because injecting huge power flows into a weak network is like pouring water into a cracked pipe
• Market design and regulatory alignment, because the electrons do not care about your policies but your citizens do

Now add permitting, land rights, environmental concerns, indigenous rights, geopolitical risk, financing, insurance, and the fact that a single failure point can cascade.

What happens naturally is that only a small set of actors can play. The club is limited.

This is the first mechanism of oligarchy: barrier to entry.

When entry is expensive and slow, influence concentrates.

The “merchant interconnector” temptation

One model that gets discussed a lot is private or quasi private interconnectors that make money by trading price differences between regions. If power is cheap in Region A and expensive in Region B, you send power across and capture the spread.

This can be efficient, sure. It can also become a toll road.

And toll roads tend to attract the same kind of political economy: owners arguing that high tolls are necessary for “maintenance” and “future expansion,” lobbying for protections, and negotiating terms that socialize risk but privatize upside.

Now imagine this at intercontinental scale.

If a handful of entities control the main arteries connecting major markets, they effectively become market makers for electricity. They do not just participate. They shape conditions.

And when conditions get shaped, governance matters more than engineering.

Intercontinental electricity is also a data business. That’s not a side note.

This is something people miss.

A modern grid is instrumented. Interconnectors run with sophisticated control systems. Forecasting, dispatch optimization, congestion pricing, ancillary services, balancing markets. The more variable renewables you have, the more important these systems become.

So the operator of a large intercontinental connection often ends up sitting on extremely valuable information:

• Real time and forecast demand patterns
• Generation availability and outage schedules
• Congestion points and system weaknesses
• Price formation signals
• Industrial consumption profiles, including sensitive ones

Data asymmetry is a classic ingredient for oligarchic advantage. You can trade better, negotiate better, and design products that lock in customers.

And if you have political ties, you can ensure competitors never quite get the same view of the playing field.

The geopolitics get weird fast

Intercontinental electricity networks sound like cooperation. And they can be. But cooperation does not eliminate leverage. It just changes the surface.

A few scenarios that tend to show up:

1. “Green export” power blocs
Regions with abundant solar or wind start exporting electricity, or exporting energy in another form that depends on electricity like hydrogen or ammonia. The exporters gain influence. The importers gain dependence. Both sides start bargaining over terms, not just price but policy alignment.

2. Strategic redundancy becomes a luxury
Wealthier states build multiple connections, multiple supply routes, and big storage. Poorer states get one cable, one link, one deal. Dependency becomes unequal, and so does bargaining power.

3. Grid security becomes national security
Cybersecurity, sabotage, undersea cable protection, converter station hardening. States get involved. Contractors with the right relationships win. Oversight gets murky because “security”.

And when oversight gets murky, rent seeking tends to flourish.

The climate narrative can be used. It can also be true. Sometimes both.

I want to be careful here. Intercontinental networks could genuinely help decarbonize, especially if they reduce curtailment, improve utilization of renewables, and provide balancing across large areas.

But the climate narrative is also politically useful. It can reduce scrutiny. It can justify fast tracking. It can make any critic sound anti progress, even when they are just asking for fair pricing, transparency, or public ownership.

This is another place oligarchic structures thrive. Not by denying the mission, but by wrapping themselves inside it.

They become “too essential to question.”

Where oligarchy actually shows up in the electricity network story

Let’s get specific, because otherwise this stays abstract.

Oligarchy tends to appear in electricity infrastructure through a handful of patterns:

1) Control of choke points

Converter stations, landing points for undersea cables, key substations. Physical nodes that cannot easily be bypassed. Whoever controls them can extract value over time.

2) Regulatory capture

If a private consortium can influence how tariffs are set, how capacity is allocated, how interconnector revenues are treated, they can design a system that looks competitive on paper but behaves like a monopoly.

3) Long term contracts that shift risk

Take or pay structures. Guaranteed returns. Currency protection. Political risk insurance. These tools can be legitimate for financing, but they can also be used to lock the public into covering downside while upside flows to a narrow group.

4) Narrative control and soft power

Funding think tanks. Sponsoring “grid of the future” conferences. Placing allies on advisory panels. It is not always bribery. It is often just persistent influence.

5) Vertical integration

Owning generation, transmission, trading desks, and sometimes large loads like data centers or industrial facilities. This is where it gets really powerful. You can move electricity and money across your own internal ecosystem and still say you are “the market.”

A quick detour. Why intercontinental grids feel inevitable anyway.

Even with all these risks, the pressure toward bigger networks is real.

• Renewables are unevenly distributed. Some places have endless sun and wind. Others do not.
• Demand is rising. Electrification is happening even when politics are messy.
• Storage helps but is not a magic wand, especially for long seasonal balancing.
• Large industrial transitions, like green hydrogen, want cheap firm power at scale.
• Extreme weather is stressing local grids, and interconnection can be resilience.

So yes, more interconnection is likely.

But “more interconnection” does not require “a handful of private gatekeepers.”

That is a choice. A policy choice. A governance choice.

What better governance could look like (without killing the project)

If the goal is to build intercontinental electricity networks without sleepwalking into oligarchy, a few principles matter. Not as slogans, but as design constraints.

Transparency that is real, not ceremonial

Public reporting of interconnector revenues, congestion rents, maintenance schedules, curtailment impacts. If an operator says a bottleneck is “technical,” the data should back it up.

Competitive access and clear capacity allocation rules

If capacity gets allocated through opaque deals, you will get oligarchy. If allocation is standardized and auditable, you at least have a fighting chance.

Limits on vertical integration where it creates conflicts

Not always possible, but regulators can restrict certain combinations. Transmission operators owning large trading operations, or owning generation on both ends, is where manipulation becomes easy.

Public stakes in critical links

This does not mean everything must be state owned. But for assets that become national security level dependencies, public equity or golden shares can create leverage for accountability.

Shared standards for cybersecurity and physical security

If one weak link can cascade across regions, standards must be aligned. And security contracts should be scrutinized, because “security” is where overspending and favoritism hide.

Build redundancy on purpose

If you have only one cable, you have a hostage situation waiting to happen. Redundancy is expensive, yes. It is also freedom.

The uncomfortable conclusion

Intercontinental electricity networks are not just wires. They are institutions.

They create new centers of gravity. They produce winners and losers. They reprice economies. They can stabilize societies or make them brittle, depending on who controls them and how fair the rules are.

In this Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series framing, the point is not that every large infrastructure effort is doomed to oligarchy. It is that the conditions are perfect for it unless governance is designed with that risk in mind.

And maybe that is the real test of the next energy era.

Not whether we can build cables across seas. We can.

The test is whether we can build them without quietly building a new class of electricity gatekeepers at the same time.

Because once the network is in place, once the dependency is normalized, it gets very hard to renegotiate. People do not renegotiate easily with the entity that keeps the lights on.

They usually just pay.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

What is the concept behind intercontinental electricity networks and why is it important?

Intercontinental electricity networks aim to connect continents using high voltage transmission lines to move electricity from areas of abundance to scarcity. This connection smooths out demand peaks and valleys by leveraging time zones, enhancing reliability, efficiency, and accelerating decarbonization efforts. It's important because it transforms electricity infrastructure into a strategic asset with significant social, political, and economic implications.

How do intercontinental grids create new strategic assets for countries?

Intercontinental grids become strategic assets by shaping electricity prices through cross-border power flows, influencing wholesale markets and regional economics. They enhance industrial competitiveness by providing cheap, reliable power that attracts industries like aluminum smelting and data centers. Additionally, they offer political leverage via contract terms, capacity allocation, maintenance schedules, and priority access during stress events, thus impacting national energy security and policy.

What are the potential risks of oligarchic control in intercontinental electricity infrastructure?

Oligarchic control arises when a small group gains outsized influence over essential electricity systems, often under the guise of being builders or problem solvers. This concentration of power can lead to rule-making that preserves their position, potentially limiting competition and public benefit. Due to the scale and complexity of intercontinental grids, they are particularly vulnerable to such structures which may impact governance, fairness, and access.

Why are intercontinental electricity networks challenging to build and how does this affect power concentration?

Building intercontinental networks requires specialized high voltage direct current (HVDC) lines, expensive converter stations, undersea cables with complex supply chains, reinforced grids at both ends, and aligned market regulations. Additional hurdles include permitting processes, land rights issues, environmental concerns, geopolitical risks, financing challenges, and cascading failure risks. These complexities create high barriers to entry that limit participation to a small set of actors, concentrating influence and power.

What is the 'merchant interconnector' model in electricity transmission and what are its pros and cons?

The 'merchant interconnector' model involves private or quasi-private entities building transmission lines that profit by trading price differences between regions—sending cheap power from one area to another where it's more expensive. While this can improve market efficiency by arbitraging price spreads, it can also function like a toll road where owners charge high fees. Such models may attract political economy issues related to ownership influence over essential infrastructure.

How does the instant and continuous nature of electricity impact the significance of intercontinental grids?

Electricity's instantaneous and continuous delivery means any failure in supply causes immediate disruption across multiple critical systems including payments, logistics, healthcare facilities, water systems, data centers, transportation signals, heating and cooling systems. Therefore, intercontinental grids introduce a new layer of dependency where control over these networks equates to significant social and political power due to their direct impact on daily life stability.