Why don’t more countries import their electricity? 

The waters off Singapore teem with tankers, container ships, freighters and smacks, importing everything from oil to electronics. Yet there is one commodity none of these vessels carries, and which the city-state wants: electricity. The tiny, rich island powers itself mostly by burning imported natural gas, despite pledging to cut emissions to net-zero by 2050. It has little room to build its own wind or solar farms. So Singapore plans to get hold of clean power in a different way: down long-distance cables from its neighbours. Its government has given preliminary approval for undersea transmission cables from Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam and even Australia, some 4,300km away. In ten years’ time Singapore wants to import a third of the power it consumes this way.