Episode 306: Electricity on the Frontlines: Russia’s War Against Ukraine’s Energy Infrastructure with Theresa Sabonis-Helf

Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has systemically targeted Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure–especially its energy systems–as a core part of Russia’s strategy. Since the start of the war, there has been over 2000 air, drone, and artillery attacks on energy infrastructure in Ukraine. Electricity grids, nuclear power plants, transmission lines, gas facilities, dams and water supply systems have all been turned into battlegrounds. This week alone, Russia’s overnight strikes hit energy and industrial infrastructure so hard that more than a million households in Odessa were left without power. This conflict is redefining what modern war looks like, where critical infrastructure is not just collateral damage but a deliberate target, where the frontlines runs not only through trenches but through the power grids. 

To unpack this further, we are joined by Theresa Sabonis-Helf, she is a professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service Masters program, serving as the Chair of the Science, Technology and International Affairs concentration. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a Professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College. She has lived and worked in seven countries of the former USSR and has assisted two of these countries with the development of their National Security Strategies.

The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical volatility and organised crime, to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.

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Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.

Transcript

I think the big risk here is not that Zaporizhia is going to experience a crisis. I think it is now managed. I think the challenge is this represents a tempting opportunity for Russia.

Can you force the shutdown of another reactor by playing brinksmanship with the level of nuclear threat? Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide. Today’s episode is sponsored by Conducttr. They’re the winner of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Innovation in 2021.

Conducttr builds fully customisable crisis management exercise, from cyber attacks to multi-layer geopolitical incidents. They use a virtual desktop of simulated emails, websites, social media and team style channels. So your crisis team can train against the risks that your company is most likely to face.

Go to Conducttr.com to learn more about their systems. Since the full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has systematically targeted Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, especially its energy systems. And this is a core part of Russia’s strategy in Ukraine.

Now, since the start of the war, there’s been over 2000 air, drone and artillery attacks on energy infrastructure in Ukraine. We’re seeing electricity grids, nuclear power plants, transmission lines, gas facilities, dams and water system. They’ve all been turned into battlegrounds today.

This week alone, Russia’s overnight strikes hit energy and industrial infrastructure so hard. In Odessa, more than a million households were left without power. This conflict is really defining and refining actually what war looks like, where critical infrastructure isn’t just a collateral damage anymore, but it’s a deliberate target.

And we’re seeing the front lines run, not just through the east of the country and the trenches, but actually right through the power grids of the entire country. I’m Dominic Bowen and I’m host of the International Risk Podcast. And to unpack this further, we’re joined by Theresa Sabonis-Helf.

She’s a professor at Georgetown University, serving as the chair of the science, technology and international affairs in the masters of science and foreign service programme. And prior to joining Georgetown, she was a professor of national security strategy at the National War College. She’s lived and worked in seven countries of the former USSR and has assisted two of those countries with the development of their national security strategies.

Professor Sabonis-Helf, welcome to the International Risk Podcast. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

I was in Ukraine. I had the real blessing of being back in Ukraine at the end of October. And one of the nights we were in Kiev, the Russian forces launched 405 strikes and other drones against Kiev.

And we thought understandably that that was quite significant. And the next morning, there was the tragedy. One of the targets was a kindergarten and two children were killed.

We hoped that that was the peak, but sadly at the beginning of November, we saw Russia launch another major mixed strike of about 503 drones and missiles, including 45 ballistic and cruise missiles. And that primarily targeted Ukraine’s energy good, just as the winter was really kicking in. Recently, 13th of December, we saw Russia launch, I think it was about 450 drones, knocking out power, as I said just before, about a million households around Odessa.

It also cut off power to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear site. And now many Ukrainians, many colleagues and friends I’m speaking to, they’re suffering from power cuts for about 16 hours a day in many parts of the city. So I wonder if you can tell us, Theresa, what does the timing, what does the targets of these attacks tell us about how Russia is weaponising energy infrastructure right now? And help us make sense of this, because it really is difficult to understand why this would be occurring still.

So I think that what we’re seeing is a repeat of what we saw last year. Now last year, and also this year, Europe worked with Ukraine during the summer to try to restore as much energy capacity as possible. And in fact, at the end of this summer, they managed to repair and add additional power and got back up a little bit above 17 megawatts.

At the worst part of the past year, they were all the way down to 12. So they managed to restore a significant amount. And they were particularly proud because Ukraine, depending on how cold it is, needs about 16.5 to 18 gigawatts of power to get through a day.

And essentially, they had built up to where they thought most days they would be able to supply power. And then the Russian attacks begin in the fall. It’s harder to do the large scale reconstruction once the weather turns.

And it is a direct way of attacking the hope of the people. If we think about it, electricity in particular, energy in general, but especially electricity, is an important social contract. People expect the government to be able to keep them warm and to keep the lights out.

And in a highly urbanised area, these areas are really not functional without electricity. And so if you can destroy that electricity and force the government to continually try to restore it, it obviously disrupts the comfort of the people. But it also disturbs a sort of social contract where what the people expect from their government, the government is unable to provide.

You’ve described this as a battle between darkness and light. And we’ve all heard now that Russia targets Ukraine’s energy infrastructure to degrade both the state’s warfighting capacity and its economy, but also to coerce the population and then the leadership through this systematic hardship and systematic attacks during winter. But I would suggest it isn’t working, whether it’s politicians, whether it’s think tanks, whether it’s peoples in shops or just mums and dads throughout the country.

I haven’t heard anyone say that this is going to lead to capitulation. If anything, it just makes it even clearer that there’s no way we could ever surrender to a country that’s going to do this to us. And it’s making the Ukrainians even more defiant.

So is there something else? Is this something else? I think the third piece has to do with, and we can see it reflected in this summer, although this summer is not the most important instance, it’s the most recent one. From June to September of this year, Ukraine exported electricity to Europe. And if we go all the way back to 2011, Ukraine started making a commitment to get all the laws and rules in place so that it could become part of the all European electricity grid, which is known as ENTSO-E.

And the idea was Europe was very encouraging because Ukraine had surplus nuclear power and the European grid was very worried about zero greenhouse gas electricity. And so Ukraine was very attractive. And because this promising market was right there, Ukraine was willing to do some difficult reforms in a 10 year period when the government had a hard time getting many things done.

But that promise of the European market was really attractive. And what Russia has done repeatedly ever since Ukraine was let into the European grid, now Russia makes it a cost to Europe. So it gets cold.

Ukraine is unable to supply full power, particularly because of all the new damage to the grid. And Europe has to make a dependent of Ukraine and Ukraine can’t pay for the electricity. So there are huge debates about how much should be given them.

And yet, if they can keep it stable, it reduces the attractiveness of the target. So I think the third piece of the puzzle here is the Kremlin is imposing a high cost on Europe for having Ukraine in the grid rather than the narrative that Ukraine was always pursuing that they would be a net asset to the European grid. I think that’s one very important thing.

I think the second one, it hasn’t come to that yet, but Russia is playing a lot of brinksmanship. There is a level of interruption of the grid that would make it unsafe to continue to operate nuclear power in Ukraine. And if that happens, if the risk level goes up high enough that the IAEA feels a need to insist on the shutdown of the nuclear power plants, that represents a complete collapse of the grid.

And Russia skirting the edge of that over and over again. Unfortunately, I think it reflects how hopeful they are about negotiations. And I think it reflects where they’re trying to position Europe and Ukraine in the negotiations.

Yeah, that’s very interesting and very concerning. I’d love to unpack all of that with you. But maybe we can start by just understanding how did the recent events, it feels to me, and then looking at the data, it seems that the patterns of attacks that we’re seeing from Russia into Ukraine are worse than in previous years.

Is that correct? And I guess the other side of that equation is, is Ukraine more prepared this winter? Are they in a better position than what they’ve been in previous winters? So I think what has happened consistently is that the European Union has come forth with some recommendations, the International Energy Agency lays out priorities, and then international assistance tries to help Ukraine rebuild. And every year, they’re trying to not only crisis response, but to strengthen the grid. And they complete this effort during the summer.

And then starting again in the fall, Russia begins to undo all that is easily damaged. You’re right that Ukraine’s in a better position. For example, they have reduced the number of days it takes to replace a transformer to 17 days, which is quite remarkable.

But that’s 17 days. The International Atomic Energy Agency just had experts on the ground very recently. And they were assessing the 10 transformers that are they believe the most important for the safe operation of the nuclear power plants.

But we know which 10 those are. And mostly Ukraine has been committing to passive defence, nets and sandbags and all of that. Ukraine’s gotten very good at shooting down drones.

But even if you have a 60% success rate, if 40% of the attacks are going to get through, and you know which 10 transformers will pose the greatest systemic risk, you need air defences. And for the second fall in a row, the International Energy Agency, which is not a military agency, it’s an energy infrastructure organisation has recommended that defending the transformers is the most important energy priority for Ukraine and for Europe and continuing to improve the equipment resupply chains. So Ukraine’s gotten good on the defence, but they’re very much on the defence.

And there is a hope among some people that these new, renewed and invigorated attacks are Russia’s effort to get Ukraine to agree to an energy ceasefire. But the indicators that we have on the ground are that Ukraine is eager for an energy ceasefire. Russia believes that they’re close enough to a negotiated settlement that they are not interested in an energy ceasefire.

So little unclear, but it seems like the two sides have different understanding of where we are right now with the vulnerability of the infrastructure. Yeah, I’d love to talk about that energy ceasefire. But just before we do, I’d love to hear a little bit more because we’ve seen that Russia has repeatedly targeted, as you said, the substations and the transformers supplying Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.

And Russia continues to occupy the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. And we saw that the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia temporarily lost all offsite power overnight. And I believe this was the 12th time during the conflict that this nuclear power plant has lost power during the conflict.

How close have we come to a nuclear accident? And is this something we should be worried about? Or is there enough checks and balances that this is something that’s going to be fine? To be clear, Zaporizhia is in a warm shutdown, which means it generates electricity, but only enough to keep the reactor itself safe. And the reason you need electricity at a reactor that’s not generating electricity is you need to keep the water moving in the cooling pools. As long as the water is moving, then the waste stored there is not a risk.

But if you cut off power to the pools, then what happens is the heat builds up, the water begins to evaporate. And as soon as the rods are exposed to air, the rate of reaction goes up and up. And if we look at Fukushima, some percentage of the damage done there had to do with steam explosions in the cooling pools rather than the reactor itself.

That’s the fear. What the IAEA has insisted on doing is put in as many diesel generators as possible. And there is a significant number of them at Zaporizhia.

And they are able to keep the cooling pools going. Remember that Zaporizhia is under Russian control, so the supply chains for the generators are not under constant threat. The other thing we need to keep in mind is what Russia learned from the shutdown of Zaporizhia.

Before the reactor went into this period that it’s been in for several years now, where it is not supplying any power to the grid, Russia interrupted the grid often enough that it was the IAEA that requested that Ukraine shut the reactor. And Russia did not assume total positive control of the reactor until Ukraine shut it down. So I think the big risk here is not that Zaporizhia is going to experience a crisis.

I think it is now managed. I think the challenge is this represents a tempting opportunity for Russia. Can you force the shutdown of another reactor by playing brinksmanship with the level of nuclear threat? Because a power plant that is generating electricity that is attached to an unstable grid is a different kind of threat than one that is in a cold or warm shutdown.

And you’re worried about making sure that there’s always a little bit of supply for the reactor itself. That makes sense? Yeah, it does. Thanks very much for clarifying that.

And we started to talk a little bit about ceasefires. And the Trump administration, of course, is pushing for a ceasefire. I’m wondering how these intensified strikes on the energy infrastructure really fit into this whole diplomatic picture.

Do they make the ceasefire more or less likely? What’s the messages that Putin’s trying to send by continuing these attacks on critical infrastructure? A lot of the current diplomacy by Whitkoff, Jared Kushner is really framed around reconstruction, investment, frozen assets, sanctions relief. A lot of people are talking about business deals. But I wonder from where you sit, in your view, does this sort of economic package and peace deal reduce Russia’s incentive to keep weaponising its attacks on energy? Or does this actually reward that tactic? To some extent, I think it does reward that tactic.

But I think that there is an interesting other conundrum. And that is, even though Russia is fairly successfully playing brinkmanship, and by the way, when they think Europe isn’t paying enough attention, they do minor attacks on like IAEA inspection teams, or the damage that they did to the new safe confinement over Chernobyl was terrifying. In scientific terms, it didn’t release radiation, but it was a reminder to Europe that this could be a lot worse.

So I do believe that Russia’s playing brinksmanship. But remember, this curious risk that Russia’s imposing on itself, they are the lead exporter of nuclear fuel to the world. And they actually hold a substantial market share.

And the more that Russia plays brinkmanship with nuclear power itself, the more they risk doing damage to the entire industry. It is the Secretary General of the IAEA, Raphael Grossi, it is his number one objective to get to the end of this war without an accident or incident nuclear on the European continent. That is an appropriate goal for him.

I would think it would be an appropriate role for Russia as well. Because regardless of what are their military aims, if Russia becomes a pariah power in the nuclear industry, that doesn’t make sense since they’re currently the world leader in that industry. So I’m a little baffled.

And I think that sometimes Russian tactics or strategy on the ground outpaces national strategy. But I do think that Russia is playing chicken because they think that Europe is more easily scared than they are. But I also think that Russia could substantially damage what is a core economic interest that otherwise they would be able to carry forward into the future regardless of the settlement.

And I don’t understand what they’re doing. The only other thing I would mention, and I don’t know why there hasn’t been more said about this, there may be something in the documents that I haven’t found, but completion of Zaporizhia, the two new reactors, it’s a complex of six reactors, it’s the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. The last two were built with European assistance as a condition for shutting down Chernobyl.

So the European Union holds the debt on two out of six of the nuclear power plants that Russia is occupying. And I don’t know why that hasn’t entered into the negotiations. I do know there’s been a lot of talk about maybe the US should manage the reactor, and I believe it may be connected to that.

But I do find it rather extraordinary that it isn’t just Ukrainian territory and Ukrainian assets that Russia is holding. These are assets on which Europe owns a substantial percentage of the debt. I’d love to talk about the other side, but I’ll just take a moment, Theresa, to remind our listeners that if you prefer to watch your podcast, the International Risk Podcast can be found on YouTube.

So do go to YouTube and search for the International Risk Podcast, and do remember to subscribe and hopefully like our content as well. Theresa, Ukraine has increasingly begun to strike back, and they’re striking Russian oil, Russian gas, and refinery infrastructure. And I think in early December alone, carried out a significant major maritime strike on Russian oil production facility in the Caspian I’m wondering if we’re starting to see a reciprocal type of energy warfare, really focussing on oil refinery and oil export facilities.

But does this change the calculus on both sides? First of all, the attack was in the Black Sea. And although I understand Ukraine’s effort to go after the Shadow Fleet, the choice to attack the ports where the Caspian Pipeline Consortium delivers its oil was somewhat problematic, because that’s Kazakh oil. And the Kazakhs have been very cooperative in trying to prevent Russia from taking over that pipeline.

The Kazakhs have tried very hard to be compliant. And it is, although it transits Russian territory, an important non-Russian source of oil. Kazakhstan has openly condemned Ukraine for doing that attack.

And I don’t know how many nations have quietly spoken to Ukraine about that. But remember, although these attacks are an exciting display of capability, and although I completely understand Ukraine’s effort to bring the war to the Russian people, anything like that, that Ukraine does has an effect on global oil price, and on some countries such as Kazakhstan, which have not been supporters of Ukraine, but importantly, have abstained from vote after vote when they had the opportunity to support Russia. So there is a problem here.

And the problem is the collateral damage on allies for both countries is potentially significant. During the Russo-Ukraine, the early phase in the winter of 2022-2023, the price of energy in Germany went up, I believe, 700%. That price shock had an enormous impact on the German budget and the German people.

What Ukraine is doing now, in its own legitimate defence, is starting to make prices unstable and unpredictable. And so although Ukraine has a lot of support, messing with the price of oil and gas as winter sets in is going to be controversial. So that’s Ukraine’s challenge.

Russia’s challenge is their game of brinksmanship with nuclear is also standing to alienate Europe. So I think one of the curious things about this is both nations, as they’re locked in this final spiral of conflict, are really not ascribing as much attention as I would have thought they would have paid to the collateral damage to Europe or potential collateral damage to Europe. When we look at the collateral damage to Europe, right across Europe this year, we’ve seen a significant increase in drone sightings, in sabotage attacks, disinformation, hybrid threats, and many of them have been targeting critical infrastructure across Europe, including in Sweden, the UK, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Germany, some of them at airports, air bases, power plants, dams, defence suppliers.

How real do you see that risk of escalation and spillover into Europe? Well, I think the intention is if the United States is moving away from Europe, it is in Russia’s interests for European nations to define their defence needs differently. It is in Russia’s interests for Europe to find it very difficult to come up with a common defence. And frankly, it is in Russia’s interest for the nations of Europe to militarise unevenly because that will change the balance of power in Europe itself.

These are the same kind of things we saw them do in Georgia, in Estonia, in Ukraine, in an earlier era, what we used to call implausibly deniable events. It’s hard to attribute them directly enough that you have a direct response and yet you know with great clarity what’s happening. Think about what Russia’s doing.

One thing they’re doing is raising the risk premium on all undersea infrastructure. It used to be we like building undersea pipelines because although they’re a bit complicated to build, underwater the pressure and temperature is much more constant. So the management of an undersea pipeline is more straightforward, but not if there are attacks on undersea infrastructure.

Then your risk premiums go up. Then the threat of building new pipelines that go around Russia and don’t involve it become a bit more complex. Then just the whole question of how do you think about the future infrastructure for oil and gas becomes a bit more tricky.

This is not unlike airports before 9-11. The risks were always there, but they had not been exploited in any dramatic way, so they weren’t incorporated into our assessment of risk. So Russia’s changing our assessment of risk.

Interestingly, in the oil industry there is a long history of what is called anchor dragging. And anchor dragging is when you do minor damage to somebody’s undersea infrastructure, not to take it offline, but to see how quickly they recognise it and how quickly they can repair it because it tells you something about the readiness of your adversary. Iran has done this quite a lot against Azerbaijan in the Caspian Sea.

Russia’s beginning to do this against Europe. I don’t know if they’re trying to get Europe to invest more in that kind of security. I believe they are trying to divide European opinion about which risks need to be addressed most urgently.

I don’t think it’s Russia’s intent for spillover conflict to occur on the European continent because hybrid warfare is much cheaper, but I do think that the opportunity for miscalculation goes up dramatically. But the thing that I find quite confusing about this is because, as you said, it’s not necessarily destroying it. Sometimes it is severing cables.

But Russia’s also encouraging Europe to harden its defences. So isn’t Russia actually making its future potential goal of invading or attacking European states actually harder because the infrastructure will have been hardened, the defences will have been strengthened, responses will have been practised, rehearsed, crisis preparedness will have been strengthened? Aren’t they sort of going against their own long-term interests by encouraging Europe to strengthen its systems? So I think the one assumption that you just voiced there that I would challenge is that it’s a Russian long-term intent to invade. I think that if you go all the way back to the 2015 Russian national security strategy, they have a throwaway line in there that is actually quite terrifying when you place it in context of everything that happened after.

They essentially say that they reject the notion that the use of force in international relations is receding. So Russia’s saying don’t pretend that future competitions are about economics, they’re about military. I don’t know that Russia wants to invade Europe.

I think that Russia wants Europe to invest a lot of resources in security infrastructure that may end up dividing Europe rather than uniting it. I think Russia feels like it has an enduring advantage on the military playing field. And if all of Europe slows their economic gains to pursue more military development, that in a strategy where you think about economics and information as well as military and diplomacy, you’re forcing redirection of resources.

And I think that’s more the Russian goal than to conquer Europe. Bear in mind, one of the factors in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there were many, but one of them was there was a secret meeting among the leaders of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia to get rid of all the non-European republics. The idea being that we Russians and white Russians can stick together and we don’t need all the Muslims and Asians and Caucasians in the mix.

I think that Russia’s sense of expansionism is focused on the Slavic peoples. I don’t think it extends more broadly beyond portions of the former Soviet space. So in that case, what does the current situation of hybrid war and real high-intensity war in Ukraine tell us about the future of conflict, about the future of energy supplies, of our infrastructure, of our defence spending? And what do you think the important lessons are that our policymakers should be taking away, both for wartime protection, but also our clean energy transition and prioritisation of domestic policies? So I think every major energy shift shifts the risk and shifts the way we have to think about the threats.

And even without the Russo-Ukraine war, we have shifted into the age of electricity. We’ve done that partly because all the developed economies are more and more reliant on data. We’ve done that in the developing world, partly because a warmer world leads nations that didn’t used to have to prioritise cooling, to have to build that infrastructure.

But what we’re seeing all over the world, separate from this war, is a big move towards electricity. There was always the desire to push that using other forms of electricity less and using renewable electricity more. But that transition has been a little bit surprised by this unprecedented demand for electricity.

So we’re moving into an age of electricity. What does that mean? Well, when Churchill was the first Lord Admiral of the Navy, he was the one who took the decision to move the from coal to oil. Oil-powered ships were much more manoeuvrable and made it much more plausible for Britannia to rule the waves, but the UK didn’t have its own oil.

And so that committed the UK to a different set of supply chains. And Churchill was very aware of that. He said the security of England lies in diversity now and diversity alone.

And so you had, after the major oil shocks of 73 and 79, Europe started moving towards gas. That had a different risk. And the risk there was that the infrastructure, until you moved to LNG, was very difficult to change.

And so that political economic relationship with Russia had a new set of vulnerabilities. Moving out of the age of gas into the age of electricity has yet another new set of vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities have to do with the fact that economically, you want your grids to be larger.

You want to be able to move power across multiple countries and time zones. You want to have multiple inputs. But a grid like that requires a high level economic unity, political oversight, and coordination.

And Russia has regularly pushed back hard on the expansion of the European grid. And that grid is now, I do believe, that Russia’s going to try to keep that grid vulnerable. Russia interfered in a lot of different ways, enough in the Baltic states when they tried to meet the standards to join the European grid, that they only succeeded in doing it this year.

The Baltic states didn’t make it into the all-European grid until after Ukraine and Moldova. I think that Russia has a particular interest in this grid issue. And I think it’s an area where they will continue to play.

It is possible to build more resilient grids. And a lot of what we know about doing that, we’re learning in Ukraine. The Ukrainian grid is more resilient.

The Ukrainians have done some very clever things, like, for example, taking a significant number of cell phone towers off the grid. You do that so that even if you’re blacked out, you can still communicate. How do you take them off the grid? Well, you either supply them with substantial storage with batteries, or solar panels, or ideally a combination of the two.

Ukraine now is more resilient in the sense that they can still communicate with each other, even when they can’t see each other in the dark. We’ve also seen a real movement in Ukraine towards thinking differently about how do we use generators? How do we integrate them selectively in the grid? How do we use power that’s more distributed and less centralised? All these things are going to be important going forward. And we’re learning it everywhere, whether it’s from hurricanes, or wildfires, or war.

We have to think about not just the economic efficiency of electricity, not just the sufficiency of it, now that there’s rising demand. With the resilience of it, how do we make that system less easily interruptible? And it’s a lesson that is now unfolding. Yeah, I was really impressed.

I had the benefit of meeting with some Ukrainian telecommunication providers and government agencies working in the telecommunication space recently. So impressed by the ingenuity, and just the intelligence, and the creativity of the way that they’re making a system work, a system that has been continually attacked by Russia. So, very, very impressive.

And I think any European business leaders that think this is a Ukrainian problem alone are really kidding themselves. And so I wonder, Theresa, if you had a room with 200 European business leaders, what’s one message that you would like them to hear, and you would like them to understand? So, over the past several decades, Europe in some ways has been more visionary than the United States. They’ve recognised that we’re moving into an era of electricity.

And they’ve done some remarkable things in environmental friendliness, in renewable energy. And they’ve also done some very clever things in making electricity less expensive, in managing markets differently, and adding some new things. What Europe has been behind on and is now rom china to the united states with Europe included is they really haven’t thought about energy security. If you look at an electricity grid and all you see are the economics redundant systems are a cost but if you look at it from a perspective of what makes this harder to interrupt what makes this easier to stand back up then you simply have to allow some economic room for resilience. And what I see in Europe is the next set of things that need to happen in the grid all have to do with those redundancies, all have to do with stabilization.

Europe needs more pumped storage hydro, Europe needs more variable tariffs, and Europe needs more backup capability. And when we look at Ukraine, one of the things Ukraine built this summer, which is quite impressive, especially given how many things that they are up against, but it’s also a reflection of how they think about security, Ukraine installed their first energy storage system complex. It’s a 200 megawatt system that stores electricity that can power 600,000 homes for two hours while they try to get the grid back up.

Those kind of capabilities are not ones we’ve built into market systems in times of peace. But I think it’s important for us to think about Ukraine in some ways. It’s many things, and this is not the only thing, but it is also the first war of the energy transition. And it teaches us a lot about how we have to think about the security of systems, which also includes the cybersecurity of systems. And again, Ukraine is leading the world in trying to think about that because Russia’s leading the world in trying to attack that.

Yeah, thanks for unpacking that. And finally, Theresa, I’d love to hear from you about when you look around the world right now, what are the international risks that concern you the most?

I spent so many years ago, I did my dissertation work, Ukraine was one of my cases. I’ve been worrying about Ukrainian nuclear energy for a number of decades. and that still occupies a huge place in my understanding. I do think that we have to revamp how we think about nuclear energy, because this is the first modern war that’s been proximate to nuclear power plants. So there’s some thinking about what do we need to do to make this less an enticing target in future conflict. I also think that we’re not prepared for one aspect of this new age of electricity. And that is for almost 30 years in the rich world, electricity demand has been flat. It’s been rising at most 1% a year. And so we’ve thought about infrastructure investment differently.

For the past two years, largely because of data, but also because of cryptocurrency and also because of some other factors, in the rich world, electricity has been growing at the rate of 3% per year, which is a fundamentally different way of thinking about what our infrastructure needs are going to be in the future. And in the developing world demand has been rising between 6% – 7%. So our thinking about the future of what we needed to keep the lights on was fundamentally incorrect. And how we adjust and adapt to that is going to be really important.

And the other piece of that is that we’re used to providing lights and cooling to the people of cities without an aggressive new competitor to the extent that demand for data center based demand for electricity is rising really rapidly.

How do we think about protecting populations from getting priced out by data companies? How do we think about the public good component of electricity? We can’t manage urban environments without reliable electricity. There is a governance advantage to electricity. The World Bank will not define you as a developed country if you cannot provide reliable electricity to 100% of your population. And now we have a new competitor for electricity and we have to think very carefully about what the policy pieces of that are. And when the data companies say, that’s all right, let us go off grid. We’ll build our own nuclear. It’ll be great. Then we have to think about what does it mean to take our highest tech sector allow them to power themselves and disengage from the public, because that’s also a risk.

And then we look at the one additional demand for electricity that is rising very rapidly that we have not built into our analysis, desalinization. How do we keep the lights on, provide the people with water, and live in a data-based economy? These things require some fundamental rethinking of infrastructure And that’s something that all nations have been slow to address.

That’s very thoughtful. Thank you very much for leaving us with that thought and thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast, Theresa.

Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a real privilege.

Well, that was a great conversation. Theresa is a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and I really appreciated her insights on how energy infrastructure has become weaponised and turned into a key battleground in Europe and maybe even across Europe, and how energy has become a really powerful weapon precisely because it does sit at that intersection between civilian needs, military operations, and of course, political pressure and what this really means for all of our futures. Please remember to subscribe to our email list on the International Risk Podcast website so you can get our newsletter in your inbox every second week. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Anna Kummelstedt and our multimedia and video content was produced by Stephen Penney. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks so much for listening.