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It enables trade in electricity between the countries.

Certainly with more and more power coming from renewables that can’t be switched on or off at will, that’s a gain for all.

Also, as to the poking, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Authority_of_Cypru... says:

“In 2015, the EAC generated a total of 4,128 GWh of electricity consuming 947,226 tonnes of fuel costing €288,632,000. Maximum demand in the areas controlled by the Republic of Cyprus reached 939 MW. A total of 2.0 GWh of the produced electricity in 2015 valued €240,000 ended up in the area occupied by Turkey and no money could be collected for it.”

I guess that might stop once Cyprus can export power to the EU (but I also wonder why they would produce such excessive amounts of electricity. Could be to keep the peace, because they promised the UN, or something similar?)

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About 36% of Cyprus by area has been occupied by Turkey since 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus

The amount that couldn't be collected is less than 1% of the total generation. So my guess is it's due to decades old infrastructure where lines just happen to cross over to where the dividing line ended up. Something similar happened in Berlin, where two West Berlin train lines happened to pass through East Berlin briefly, and were allowed to continue to do so even after the wall went up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_U-Bahn

I can easily see the utility deciding that it's easier and cheaper to just let a small bit of power get stolen than incur the costs of changing that infrastructure, as well as the PR costs of cutting off that power. Overall grid losses are likely to be 5% or so anyway.

Oops. Misread that American comma thousands separator as a decimal one, thinking it was close to 50%. That makes a huge difference.

* English language comma thousands separator

You'll never find . used as a thousands separator in the UK, Australia or English-speaking Canada either.

Thanks for linking about Turkish occupation of Cyprus. I was completely unaware. There's a nice map in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Buffer_Zone_in_... if anyone is curious about what the separation looks like today.

> Certainly with more and more power coming from renewables that can’t be switched on or off at will, that’s a gain for all.

Just today there was a story in the news here in Norway how the windmills in Sweden is causing a massive price disparity between north and south of Norway, due to lack of transmission capability.

These days the price disparity can be over 50%, and Sweden is planning to massively expand their windmill generation up north.

[1]: https://www.nrk.no/urix/tror-svensk-vindkraftsatsing-vil-gi-...

Yeah, our "north-south" infrastructure is behind and it will take about 20 years to fully resolve, sorry it impacts you Norway!

Sweden has an interesting problem where we want to build more wind power, but it can only really be done in the north at scale, but then the transmission capacity down south is missing, and that's where all the consumers are!

Same situation in Germany

So the beaches of Iraklion won't smell like diesel anymore?

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