Global electricity trade network: Structures and implications

• Main Authors: Ji, Ling, Jia, Xiaoping, Chiu, Anthony S.F., Xu, Ming
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: Electric power production; Electric power distribution; Electric power; Selling—Electric power; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering; Power and Energy
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/4452
• Institution: De La Salle University

Nations increasingly trade electricity, and understanding the structure of the global power grid can help identify nations that are critical for its reliability. This study examines the global grid as a network with nations as nodes and international electricity trade as links. We analyze the structure of the global electricity trade network and find that the network consists of four sub-networks, and provide a detailed analysis of the largest network, Eurasia. Russia, China, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan have high betweenness measures in the Eurasian sub-network, indicating the degrees of centrality of the positions they hold. The analysis reveals that the Eurasian sub-network consists of seven communities based on the network structure. We find that the communities do not fully align with geographical proximity, and that the present international electricity trade in the Eurasian sub-network causes an approximately 11 million additional tons of CO2 emissions. © 2016 Ji et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.