Belgium Just Spent Ten Years and 300 Million Euros on Pylons, Which Is the Least Glamorous Kind of Industrial Policy

The Brabo high voltage line was inaugurated on Tuesday at the port of Antwerp, with the Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever and his Dutch counterpart Rob Jetten in attendance. The transmission operators Elia and TenneT used the occasion to announce that they will also reinforce the connection between Kinrooi and Maasbracht, a second crossing between the two countries.

Elia has put more than 300 million euros into the Brabo network over the past decade. What that buys is extra power into the port of Antwerp and a stronger link to the Dutch grid, carried on what are said to be the tallest pylons in the Benelux. It is a decade of work that produces nothing a passenger on the motorway would notice beyond taller masts.

The argument for spending it is that the port is a chemical cluster before it is a harbour, and chemistry runs on electricity. An industrial site that cannot get a grid connection does not build, and a cluster that cannot offer connections stops attracting the plants that make it a cluster. Elia's chief executive, Bernard Gustin, framed the case in those terms, saying the point is to stop electricity becoming the constraint on economic development, and naming data centres as the demand that has to be planned for now rather than later.

The cross border half is the part with the strategic weight. A grid that is well connected to its neighbour can import when it is short and export when it is long, which flattens both prices and risk. Gustin made that point directly: the stronger the link between the two countries, the less either is exposed to shocks in the energy market on its own.

It is worth setting this beside the other energy story of the week. Belgium took all of its liquefied natural gas from Russia in July, a figure driven by a collapse in overall LNG buying rather than by any decision. Interconnection is the slow answer to that kind of exposure. It does not make headlines when it works, it takes ten years and three hundred million euros to build, and it is the difference between a market that absorbs a shock and one that passes it straight to customers.