Those rules are reversed as soon as you cross an international border. About 85% of the world’s oil is consumed in a country other than the one where it’s produced, and 25% and 20%, respectively, of its gas and coal. The equivalent figure for electricity is just 2.1%. Outside a handful of places — the European Union; the US and Canada; Brazil and Paraguay; mainland China and Hong Kong — electrical power is almost absent from cross-border commerce.
It’s a paradox of power markets that the most tradable form of energy is the least-traded.
Ask a grid planner the best way to get the kilojoules trapped in a remote coal seam into urban consumers’ plug sockets, and the answer is straightforward. It’s much easier to build a generator at the mine and transport the electricity through a power cable than to cart sooty rocks to a power plant closer to someone’s home.
