{"word_count": 217, "character_count": 1548}
Interlinking the Arab Gulf : Opportunities and Challenges of GCC Electricity Market Cooperation / Laura El-Katiri. Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, July 2011, 48 p. (EL 8)http://www.oxfordenergy.org/2011/07/interlinking-the-arab-gulf-opportunities-and-challenges-of-gcc-electricity-market-cooperation/On  20 April 2011, the UAE along with other members of the Gulf Cooperation  Council (GCC) celebrated the inauguration of the country’s link to the  GCC Interconnection Grid, a vast high-voltage system that now interlinks  five of the six GCC countries’ national electricity networks. The event  marks an important further step in the project’s history of more than  thirty years of planning, negotiation and implementation, and follows  the grid’s inauguration in July 2009, when Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and  Saudi Arabia first “plugged in” to one another. The only link left for  completion is now the link between the UAE and Oman, which is planned  for 2013. This paper explores the economic and political significance of  the GCC Interconnection for the region. Currently, the regional power  grid serves only as a back-up mechanism supplying electricity-short  countries with ad hoc supplies of electricity. In the long term,  however, the grid has the potential to become effectively a tool for  commercial electricity trade between the GCC states and hence to help  create a regional electricity market, leading also to far greater  economic integration, provided the GCC proceed with their domestic  utility sector reform agenda.&#160;