Southeast Asia has been planning a unified electricity grid since 1997. Now, nearly 30 years later, its leaders are giving renewed impetus to the push to get energy flowing seamlessly across borders and seabeds.

In Cebu earlier this month, leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations put the power grid’s development high on their summit agenda, aiming to better insulate the region against the next big energy shock.

But as regional governments try to turn the decades-long dream of an Asean power grid into reality, the system they are working to build faces more challenges than it was initially designed for.

“The existing system needs to be redesigned to accommodate this new technology,” said Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at the Ember think tank and co-author of its new report, “Rewiring Resilience: AI for Climate-Adaptive Power Grids in Asia-Pacific”, released on Thursday.

“The main thing is about making the existing system more flexible and to be able to manage variabilities introduced by renewables.”

Explosive growth in renewable energy, electric vehicles and data centres is already placing ever greater demand on existing national grids. And the original regional grid blueprint – conceived for a fossil-fuel world – is looking increasingly ill-suited to the task.