OSOWOG (One Sun One World One Grid) : Innovative investments favouring Net Zero Carbon energy exchanges among interconnected continents

Southeast Asia centred on India to accelerate the transition towards a low-carbon energy system in a sustainable manner. The core philosophy of OSOWOG is captured in the motto “The Sun never sets.” It works by continuously harnessing solar power from whichever parts of the world are currently sunlit and transmitting that energy, through a globally interconnected grid, to regions experiencing night or high demand. This Indian initiative envisions transcontinental, trans-regional and regional grid interconnections that pool renewable resources - solar, wind, hydro, storage, and green hydrogen-while ensuring cost-effective supply-demand balance and substantial CO2 emissions reduction by advancing Cross Border Electricity Trade (CBET).

The transmission interconnector corridors interconnecting regional grids South Asia, ASEAN,

GCC, Africa and Europe would collectively represent as a OSOWOG Super grid (OSG) would require massive investment. For example, India’s submarine power cable-based interconnection with UAE, Saudi Arabia and Singapore would require massive 20 billion USD investment.

Mobilising such massive investment, strategic investment decisions and innovative instruments will play a pivotal role in OSOWOG corridor infrastructure development which will be the regional and global back bone for rapidly accelerating clean energy transition. These investment decisions are enormously complex, strategically driven, politically influenced, often involve high uncertainty, irreversible in nature once investment decision is made, long payback periods, and intertwined interdependencies. This paper is focusing on utilising these perspective transregional grid interconnections for integrating regional electricity grids (REGs) as a background context and have suggested a strategic investment decisions frameworks along with institutional mechanisms and potential innovative investment mechanisms/initiatives such as OSOWOG

Grid financing initiative and OSOWOG grid integration fund that will help in building OSOWOG infrastructure which in turn will minimize total cost of global and regional system, build affordable interconnection, reduce CO2 emissions, enhance grid resilience and energy security by fostering large net zero carbon energy exchanges in the form of clean energy CBET.