The Making of Europe's Critical Infrastructure

Common Connections and Shared Vulnerabilities

P. Högselius, A. Hommels, A. Kaijser, E. van der Vleuten, P. Högselius, A. Hommels, A. Kaijser, E. van der Vleuten, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137358738
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Europe's critical infrastructure is a key concern to policymakers, NGOs, companies, and citizens today. A 2006 power line failure in northern Germany closed lights in Portugal in a matter of seconds. Several Russian-Ukrainian gas crises shocked politicians, entrepreneurs, and citizens thousands of kilometers away in Germany, France, and Italy. This book argues that present-day infrastructure vulnerabilities resulted from choices of infrastructure builders in the past. It inquires which, and whose, vulnerabilities they perceived, negotiated, prioritized, and inscribed in Europe's critical infrastructure. It does not take 'Europe' for granted, but actively investigates which countries and peoples were historically connected in joint interdependency, and why. In short, this collection unravels the simultaneous historical shaping of infrastructure, common vulnerabilities, and Europe.

Part I

Connecting a Continent

Introduction

The chapters in Part I inquire about the emergence and governance of critical European infrastructure vulnerabilities from a transcontinental perspective. We focus in particular on natural gas (Chapter 2) and electricity (Chapter 3) networks. These have been at the heart of Europe’s energy issues throughout the postwar era, and they still play a dominant role in its present-day energy supply. For instance, of the 1848 million tons of oil equivalent in the 2007 energy balance of the European Union (EU-27), 74 per cent was transported as natural gas or electricity to agricultural, industrial, service, and household users.¹ Although this figure includes huge transport and conversion losses, electricity and natural gas supplies surely have become “critical” to Europe’s economic and social life.

As we shall see, natural gas and electricity system-builders have identified a number of criticalities and vulnerabilities since the very inception of these transcontinental networks. Accordingly, they have taken technical or organizational measures to reduce the vulnerability of their systems to internal and external threats (system vulnerability), and the vulnerability of users to system malfunctions (user vulnerability). The chapters in Part I investigate how and why these huge energy systems emerged, which and whose vulnerabilities were identified, prioritized, anticipated, and/or ignored in this process, and how actors chose to respond to them. In both gas and electricity, as we shall see, the overall logic of transnational system-building was closely linked with and affected by actors’ vulnerability concerns. In the early days of both systems, the main challenge was to balance long-term supply and demand in such a way that the growth of the systems could proceed smoothly, and the corresponding vulnerability had to do with a fear of structural energy shortage. Later on there was a shift to a new type of vulnerability in terms of a fear of temporary disruptions, instabilities, and harmful environmental effects.

In Chapter 2, Per Högselius, Anna Åberg, and Arne Kaijser analyze the development of transnational natural gas systems in Europe during the Cold War and the remarkable growth of gas flows from the Soviet Union to Western Europe. They show that the construction of transnational gas pipelines in Europe was initially driven by importers’ desires to access high-quality fuel that was not (sufficiently) available domestically. Importing gas from a single supplier was perceived as a risk, however, and as soon as an importer had built a pipeline to a foreign supplier, it felt highly motivated to follow this up with links to additional foreign sources. This strategy paved the way for Soviet natural gas to become an important source of energy in Western Europe – seemingly against the military and political logic of the Cold War: access to Soviet gas was seen as an efficient way to prevent Dutch, Norwegian, or Algerian natural gas from attaining a national or regional monopoly, while also stimulating relations with these alternative suppliers.

In electricity supply, as Vincent Lagendijk and Erik van der Vleuten show in Chapter 3, the possibility of power imports and exports likewise sparked visions of a transcontinental grid even back in the interwar years. Importers saw opportunities to reduce their domestic energy shortages, and visionaries argued that electricity made it possible to evenly distribute Europe’s dispersed energy resources to all. However, not all stakeholders subscribed to this motive – with due implications for transnational system-building and vulnerability outcomes. In most parts of Europe, long-distance transmission of vast amounts of electric power remained marginal: on the eve of the neoliberal era in the 1980s, an average of only 5–6 per cent of all electricity crossed a border as an import or export commodity, which means that nearly 95 per cent did not. Although transmission lines connected the Atlantic to Siberia and the Arctic Circle to northern Africa, power companies and national governments used electricity trade only as a supplement to domestic energy autonomy. If cross-border connections nevertheless proliferated, it was to stabilize domestic systems rather than to trade in energy: connections across borders would facilitate emergency support in case of supply disruptions. Moreover, following the laws of physics, a synchronously coupled system would instantaneously counteract and correct any failures in the common voltage and frequency. The larger the system, the more counteraction to local disturbances. The fact that cross-border interconnections also introduced new vulnerabilities, such as cascading blackouts, only made vulnerability concerns more prominent in the building of electricity systems.

A central question discussed in Part I is how Europe’s transnational energy infrastructure was governed. Electricity and natural gas systems both consisted of complex networks of trunklines transmitting energy over vast distances, combined with very dense local distribution networks that connected almost every household and every industry in Europe to the system. The systems were based on grids or pipes, which demanded sophisticated coordination. The complex governance structures of both systems functioned simultaneously at several levels, relying on the activities of commercial actors, multilateral organizations, local and regional actors, and national governments. Many of these played important roles in emergent transnational governance modes, taking the form of bilateral relations in the case of natural gas, and bilateral and multilateral relations in the case of electricity. Also, state governments were often more involved in shaping the European natural gas regime than in shaping electricity collaborations. The respective chapters explain why these differences emerged.

Intriguingly, both natural gas and electricity connections were built and used across the Iron Curtain. By the mid-1970s, natural gas networks in Austria, Italy, West Germany, and France had already been connected to the Soviet and Eastern European natural gas system, and indirectly several other countries were linked to the communist gas infrastructure. These links across the Iron Curtain were often far more important than links between individual Western European countries. East–West integration was not at all as pervasive in electricity as it was in natural gas. The two chapters explain why Western European actors chose to make themselves dependent on steady gas flows from beyond the Iron Curtain, whereas in electricity they were less willing to take such steps. As we will see, again vulnerability considerations took center stage.

The chapters in Part I also analyze the nature, causes, and effects of “critical events.” Contrary to common perception, the main types of critical event that actually occurred in natural gas infrastructure were of a similar type as in electricity, taking the form of unintended technical failures and logistic breakdowns. During the Cold War the Soviet Union never used natural gas as an “energy weapon” analogous to the OPEC “oil weapon.” The only intentional critical events recorded in the natural gas sector during this period took the form of a series of strikes on Norwegian offshore oil and gas installations in the early 1980s. In the case of electricity, Eastern and Western European collaborations developed in parallel, with different vulnerability management priorities and corresponding implications for blackouts: Western stakeholders tended to focus on minimizing user vulnerabilities in their attempts to build high-reliability organizations, while Eastern stakeholders prioritized the system reliability of the main grid. As a result the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) power backbone rarely went down either, but user reliability was routinely sacrificed, as apartment blocks were intermittently shut off to secure the integrity of the overall system. This is why citizens in several Eastern European states remember the Cold War as the “disco era” – with lights constantly flashing on and off. Finally, major external critical events such as the oil crises of 1973/4 and 1979 had strong impacts on both gas and electricity, forcing system-builders and other actors to adapt to new realities.

What did Europe look like from the perspective of natural gas and electricity interdependencies and vulnerabilities? The two chapters approach this question by showing how the use of pan-European gas and electricity infrastructure, and in particular critical events such as blackouts and gas crises, revealed geographies of Europe that only partially corresponded to familiar political borders. In the gas case a “hidden regionalization” of Europe divided the Continent into three major regions unseen on “normal” European maps. In the electricity case, a similar hidden regionalization took the form of major synchronized blocks that did defy some political borders, such as the tight interconnection between continental Europe and northern Africa, yet reproduced others, such as the Iron Curtain. After 1989, Europe’s “Electric Curtain” again followed political events; rather than vanishing, it moved eastward roughly to the borders of the former Soviet Union. The so-called European blackout of November 4, 2006 neatly displayed Europe’s resulting electricity geography, cascading from northern Germany southward to the Mediterranean and crossing via the Iberian peninsula into northern Africa; yet it affected neither the nearby Scandinavian peninsula in the north nor regions to the east of the new Electric Curtain.

Note

1.Commission of the European Communities 2010, p. 41. After conversion and transport losses, users receive just 289 million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) of electricity and 269 Mtoe of natural gas.

2

Natural Gas in Cold War Europe: The Making of a Critical Infrastructure

Per Högselius, Anna Åberg, and Arne Kaijser

Introduction

On January 1, 2006, Russian gas company Gazprom hastily decided to interrupt its delivery of natural gas to neighboring Ukraine. During a few dramatic days the Russian move raised concerns in large parts of Europe, since the interruption to Ukraine also had a direct effect on the gas supply to countries located further downstream the same pipeline. On January 2, gas companies in Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria reported a drastic drop in pressure – at a time of peak winter demand for natural gas. The crisis threatened the steady supply of electricity and heat to a vast number of industrial enterprises, power plants, hospitals, schools, households, and other gas users.

The immediate reason for the crisis was the failure to reach an agreement about a renewal of the Russian-Ukrainian gas export and transit contract. This problem, however, was in turn related to the general strain in relations between the two countries following the recent “Orange Revolution,” after which Ukraine had embarked on more Western and less Russian-oriented political development. The acute problem of delivery was later solved through negotiations and the conclusion of a new Russian-Ukrainian gas contract, but the crisis gave rise to dismay and perplexity in Europe. Within the European Union (EU), demands for sanctions against Russia were raised. From a German perspective, the incident seemed to confirm the need for a new direct natural gas connection between Germany and Russia through the Baltic Sea – the Nord Stream pipeline – as an alternative to the apparently risky and unreliable transit through Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland. However, in Central European media the proposed Nord Stream pipeline was interpreted as a threat. Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, even dubbed the project “the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pipeline,” since in his view – and many others’ – it was unpleasantly reminiscent of the infamous Soviet-German pact of 1939.¹

Similar “gas crises” became a more or less regular phenomenon in Europe during the following years, culminating in the much-publicized crisis of January 2009, which affe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• General Introduction
• Part I: Connecting a Continent
• Part II: Negotiating Neighbors
• Part III: Coping with Complexity
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index