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Multi-Criteria analysis of Europe-Africa electrical interconnection

Virirakis Georgios

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Summary

The concept of energy security is admittedly interconnected to that of energy independence and is commonly perceived to have the characteristics of reliability and sufficiency. Electricity interconnections and grids can serve certain geo­political interests in numerous ways. Political entities can take advantage of the power demands to establish asymmetrical dependencies and therefore market dominance, legal-regulatory dominance, even technical and economic dominance; they can exploit them to pursue mercantilist goals. Cross-border transmission lines linking electric grids of different standards, establish new channels for projecting geopolitical influence and new spheres of influence. As they extend beyond state borders and across legal jurisdictions, they enable a diffusion of geo­political power which actually affects the energy security domain in a planetary scale. The purpose of this thesis is the development of a cross-border route selection methodology that examines the project risks that reflect the geopolitical characteristics of the transit regions that influence the energy safety and its potential environmental impact. Defines the alternative routes, selects the weights of criteria that affect the interconnection design and compares the routes, considering the data of the geopolitical indicators of the regions involved, as well as the experience and the knowledge of the decision maker. Also, the consistency and sensitivity of the results are examined. The proposed methodology is applied in the real case of the transcontinental routing of electric power, between East- North Africa and East Europe, using the island of Crete as an energy hub for power transmission. Our analysis incorporates elements of AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process). As a result, different scenarios of criteria weights are used and discussed. The use of the AHP modeling software from SpiceLogic allowed the quick application of the proposed methodology and scenarios, thus facilitating a quick and effective examination of the consequences of different route choices.Keywords: Multi-criteria Analysis, Analytic Hierarchical Process, Cross-border transmission lines, Geopolitical criteria, Optimal Path Selection, Geopolitical Indices.

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