\u201cHow to prepare for a power outage?\u201d reads the Facebook post from the Estonian Rescue Board, the country\u2019s civil defense agency. The picture shows a young woman holding up a power bank, over a table loaded with water bottles, a flashlight and other emergency supplies. <\/p>\n
Estonia, along with fellow Baltic states Latvia and Lithuania, is counting down the days to finally ridding itself of one of the last vestiges of 50 years of Soviet occupation: an electricity grid controlled by Russia. <\/p>\n
Preparing the population for what most see as the unlikely scenario of power outages is the final stage in a years-long project. \u201cEverything should flow smoothly,\u201d reads the rescue board post, \u201cbut unexpected situations can arise\u2026 whether that be because of the actions of our hostile neighbor to the East, unexpected weather conditions or technical failures.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Baltics have been getting ready for this moment for almost the entire two decades since they joined the EU and NATO in 2004. They\u2019ve renovated existing infrastructure, and built new power lines including several undersea cables to Finland and Sweden and a crucial overland link to the mainland European grid, the LitPol line linking Lithuania and Poland. <\/p>\n
That meant that just a few months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, all three countries were able to stop buying electricity from Moscow. <\/p>\n
But Russia was still in total control of the functioning of the grid, balancing supply and demand, and maintaining the frequency, said Susanne Nies, project lead at the German energy research institute Helmholtz-Zentrum. And, in another holdover from Soviet times, it was still providing these services for free. <\/p>\n
Six months ago, the Baltic countries officially notified Russia of their intention to \u201cdesynchronize\u201d and so, on February 7, the so-called BRELL (Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) agreement that governs the shared grid will expire. <\/p>\n
On February 8, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will simultaneously disconnect from that grid, at which point they will need to briefly function as an \u201cisland,\u201d surviving only on the electricity they produce. On February 9, they plan to synchronize their newly independent grid with the Continental Europe Synchronous Area, which covers most of the European Union. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s a highly symbolic moment. Outside the Energy and Technology Museum in the center of Lithuania\u2019s capital, Vilnius, a countdown clock has been ticking down the last 100 days to \u201cenergy independence.\u201d \u201cThis is the final break from its Soviet-era occupation,\u201d said Jason Moyer, a foreign policy analyst at the Wilson Center, a think tank in Washington. \u201cPsychologically, this is a huge step forward.\u201d <\/p>\n
The project has involved significant investment, most of it from the European Union, which has provided grants worth over $1.2bn. But for the Baltics, the price of allowing Moscow to maintain that leverage over their power grid was too high. \u201cWe understand fairly well that the cheap Russian energy, it always comes at a price that no democratic European country should be able to afford,\u201d said P\u00e4i. <\/p>\n
And lest there be any doubt as to their resolve, last year Lithuania\u2019s grid operator Litgrid started cutting old Soviet cables that formed connections to Belarus so the lines could be repurposed. <\/p>\n