ASEAN officials tour UK-France power link - but don't expect a new grid just yet
A study visit to a Hampshire converter station is being billed as progress on a regional ASEAN power grid - here's what actually happened versus what's still just an ambition.
What actually happened
Between 21 and 25 September, a delegation of officials, regulators and utility representatives from ASEAN member states toured the UK, France and Brussels to look at how Europe handles cross-border electricity links. The itinerary included a stop at National Grid’s Daedalus Converter Station in Hampshire, home to IFA2 — the subsea cable that has carried electricity between Britain and France since 2021.
That’s it, in concrete terms. This was a fact-finding trip, organised jointly by the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the French government’s development agency and the UK, with EU involvement. Nobody signed a contract, laid any cable, or committed funding. The government’s own write-up is careful to frame it as “knowledge exchange” in support of an existing ASEAN initiative — the long-running ASEAN Power Grid (APG) project and its submarine cable framework.
So who is actually building anything here
Nobody, yet — not through this visit. The ASEAN Power Grid is a decades-old ambition among South East Asian nations to interconnect their national electricity systems, much as European countries have done with interconnectors like IFA2. It has existed on paper since the early 2000s, with patchy progress: a handful of bilateral links exist between countries such as Thailand, Laos and Malaysia, but a fully meshed regional grid remains far off.
This trip is best understood as technical and institutional capacity-building — ASEAN officials watching how Britain and France actually run a working interconnector, including the regulatory and operational “plumbing” around it, rather than just the physics of cable and converter stations. UK Ambassador to ASEAN Helen Fazey’s quoted remarks make the point explicitly: delivering regional connectivity “requires strong partnerships, trusted institutions” — not just infrastructure. That’s a tacit admission that the hard part isn’t the engineering.
Does this affect UK energy bills or supply
No. There’s no new interconnector being built between the UK and anywhere in South East Asia — that would be geographically absurd given the distances involved. IFA2 continues to do exactly what it’s always done, moving power between Britain and France. Nothing about its operation, capacity or ownership changes because a delegation visited it. If you’re a UK bill-payer wondering whether this story means anything for your electricity supply, the answer is: not directly, and not soon.
What to watch instead
The genuine story here is ASEAN’s own progress — or lack of it — towards actually interconnecting its member states’ grids. That’s measured in built transmission links, signed cross-border agreements and operational cable capacity, not in study tours. The ASEAN Power Grid Enhanced Memorandum of Understanding and the submarine cable framework mentioned in the release are the real documents to track if you want to know whether this ambition is moving from PowerPoint to power lines.
The takeaway
A study visit is exactly that: officials learning from an established European model. It’s a sensible, low-cost step in a long-term regional energy project, but it’s not evidence of any near-term breakthrough, and it has zero bearing on how the UK’s own interconnectors or electricity supply operate. File this under diplomatic groundwork, not grid news.