Electricity to come to Hungary from Azerbaijan under the sea

Hungary and its partners have made a commitment to a unique project, the construction of the world’s longest submarine cable to deliver electricity from Azerbaijan via Georgia and Romania to Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in Bucharest on Saturday, ahead of a ceremony to sign an agreement on the project.

The European Union has been caught in a “strategic vacuum”, in which the leaders of member states need to ensure energy and economic security for their countries through identifying and securing new energy sources, Orbán said. He added that energy sources in the Caspian region were “within a reasonable distance” and the cable project announced today would provide an “innovative solution” for their exploitation.

Concerning the situation in Europe, Orbán said it had “never been as chaotic in the records of history”. He pointed to the war in Ukraine, a serious energy crisis with soaring prices and supply shortages. He said an inflation is also hitting the European economy, while “the leaders of Europe have decided to separate the Russian and European economies, and the United States has in the meantime introduced a series of unprecedented market protection measures which are also hitting Europe”.

“An epoch in the history of the European economy of importing cheap raw materials and energy from Russia is over; we used to provide western technologies in turn and it yielded economic growth and military security for both sides,” Orbán said. “There is no new strategy, that is why we have a strategic vacuum,” he added.

The new cable, delivering Azerbaijan’s electricity generated mostly from wind and solar energy, will be 1,195 kilometres long and complete with an optic internet cable linking Romania and Georgia.