I only mention that specific example because it's something that China has previously proposed - the "global energy internet". As China dominates ultra-high-voltage transmission technology, it would obviously be in their best interest to be the ones who create and maintain them, but it's an interesting idea regardless of the political advantages.

From Bloomberg, in 2021:

For people who’ve been promoting the idea of supergrids for years, it feels as though the winds have turned in their favor. “I think our time has come,” says Mika Ohbayashi, director of the Renewable Energy Institute, a Tokyo-based organization set up in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster by Softbank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son. Its mission is to promote a Northeast Asia supergrid that would connect China, Japan, Mongolia, Russia, and South Korea. Says Ohbayashi: “I cannot imagine a Japan in 2050 which is still isolated from everywhere else.”

Europe has been building HVDC connectors to allow the controlled supply of power from one nation’s AC grid to another for decades: In 2018, European countries traded just over 9% of their electricity across borders, compared to less than 2% in the Americas and 0.6% in Asia, according to the International Energy Agency. The trade tends to reduce prices by increasing competition. It also boosts resilience, ensuring that should one nation’s grid suffer a catastrophic outage, it could simply draw from others to keep the lights on.

...

HVDC cables can also make viable the construction of remote, power plant-size renewable installations on land. Mongolia’s Gobi desert is at the heart of the Northeast Asia supergrid project promoted both by China and Ohbayashi’s institute. In theory, the Gobi has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power—more than double the U.S.’s entire installed power generation capacity—to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions. The Gobi’s potential remains largely unrealized, in part because there is currently little means to deliver the power produced there beyond Mongolia’s tiny market.

The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile’s Atacama Desert, which has the world’s highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China’s. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China; Xi’s vision of a global energy network is straight out of his 2011 book, The Third Industrial Revolution.

If transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways indeed lie in our shared future, China is showing the way. In December, it completed a $3.45 billion, 970-mile-long, 800-kilovolt UHVDC line to carry solar- and wind-generated power from the high Tibetan plains to China’s center. That followed construction of a 1.1 million-volt cable that can transmit up to 12,000 megawatts of power—a little more than the entire installed generation capacity of Ireland—from the deserts and mountains of Xinjiang province to the doorstep of Shanghai, almost 2,000 miles east. (High voltage cables are classed as 500 kilovolts and above, while ultra-high voltage—a Chinese specialty—operate at 800 kilovolts or above.)

The global supergrid effort has been spearheaded by Liu Zhenya, a former head of the State Grid Corp. of China (SGCC), who chairs the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization, a UN-backed body based in Beijing. Geidco’s phased plan starts by strengthening national grids and moves on to building regional networks, before finally—around 2070—completing construction of a full 18-channel Earth-spanning grid.

SGCC, which is the world’s largest utility, has been on a buying spree that’s enabling it to do some of that first-stage strengthening. Since 2008, it has acquired stakes as high as 85% in electricity distribution companies in the Philippines, Portugal, Australia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Greece, Italy, and last year, Oman. Other Chinese companies have also been buying shares in foreign grids.

“From a U.S. perspective, this is something to be worried about,” says Phillip Cornell, an energy specialist at Washington’s Atlantic Council. “It isn’t that ‘I will cut off your power,’ like Russia cut off gas supplies to Europe in 2006, or like OPEC in the ‘70s. But the equation with the global financial system is a good one. You are laying down the backbone of countries’ power systems, and there is a lot of hardware and software involved. All of a sudden, you are in a Chinese ecosystem.”

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