Not just enough for ourselves: Latvia's real energy question is whether Europe needs us
Latvia's energy debate usually stops at whether the country can cover its own consumption. Speaking on TV24, Kaspars Liepiņš argues the more valuable question is whether Europe has a reason to need us at all.
NEWS
HydrogenLatvia
8/31/20264 min read
Latvia's energy debate usually ends where it should begin. We count megawatts, connection agreements and the share of our own consumption we can cover — and then we stop. Speaking on TV24's programme “Nacionālo interešu klubs”, Kaspars Liepiņš, operations coordinator of the Latvian Hydrogen Alliance, put a harder question on the table: not whether Latvia can supply itself, but whether Europe has any reason to need us.
The question behind the potato sack
The image he used was deliberately unflattering. A country sitting on a sack of potatoes with a log tucked under its arm, in his words, “won't be particularly interesting to anyone in Europe.”
The point is not that self-sufficiency is worthless. It is that self-sufficiency buys nothing beyond our own border. A country that covers only its own demand is a country nobody has to negotiate with. A country that supplies molecules others cannot easily source elsewhere is part of a system — and being part of a system is what turns energy policy into geopolitical weight.
There is precedent for this in Latvia's own economic history. Liepiņš points to the interwar period, when the country found products that carried it into international markets — bacon and butter. That particular window has closed and competing on those terms today is hard. The question is what replaces them.
What geography actually gave us
His answer is renewable energy and everything downstream of it, including fuel and heat production. That is not wishful thinking about a resource we lack. It is an inventory of what is already here.
A power system already dominated by renewables — the IEA puts renewable sources at around three-quarters of Latvia's domestic electricity generation, led by hydropower on the Daugava.
Wind and solar capacity arriving at pace, with substantial new connections completed through 2025 and 2026 and several gigawatts of transmission capacity reserved for renewable projects.
Forest cover across more than 40% of the country, plus a growing biogas and biomethane sector — meaning access to biogenic CO₂, the carbon input that synthetic fuels require.
A position on the map between renewable production in the north and industrial demand in Germany and Central Europe.
Taken separately, none of these is decisive. Taken together, they describe a country that can convert electricity into something storable, transportable and saleable — which is precisely what a molecule is. While still challenged by high costs and low availability, green hydrogen is an increasingly viable route to decarbonising industrial processes, and the same logic extends to synthetic fuels for aviation and shipping.
From counting megawatts to counting our place in the chain
This is where the argument asks something of policy rather than of developers. Latvia is good at measuring installed capacity. It is far less practised at asking what position that capacity buys us inside somebody else's value chain.
A wind farm is an asset. A confirmed place in a European supply chain is leverage. The two are related but they are not the same thing, and only the second one changes how Latvia is treated when the continent is deciding where energy security investment goes. Hydrogen and synthetic fuel production are the mechanism that converts the first into the second, because they turn intermittent domestic generation into a product with a buyer on the other end.
Read that way, the discussion stops being about individual power plants, wind parks or hydrogen projects. It becomes a question about whether Latvia finds a niche in Europe — and whether the country's output ends up being something others genuinely need.
The corridor is no longer a drawing
The infrastructure side of this argument has already left the concept stage. The Nordic-Baltic Hydrogen Corridor, developed jointly by the transmission system operators of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Germany, holds EU Project of Common Interest status and is designed to move roughly 2.7 million tonnes of hydrogen a year by 2040 across a network of around 2,500 kilometres, with commercial operation targeted from 2033 onward.
In Latvia it is now a matter of land parcels. Conexus Baltic Grid ran an initial public consultation from 28 July to 1 September 2026 as part of the environmental impact assessment for the Latvian section, which could run some 270 to 280 kilometres, largely parallel to the existing gas transmission system. The initial study area covers 1,773 land parcels. That is what “being part of a larger system” looks like when it stops being rhetoric.
Demand that is already written into law
The synthetic fuels half of the argument has a legal floor under it. Under ReFuelEU Aviation, fuel suppliers at EU airports must meet a rising sustainable aviation fuel share — 2% from 2025, 6% from 2030 and 70% by 2050 — and, according to the European Commission, a dedicated synthetic aviation fuel share of 1.2% from 2030, climbing to 35% by 2050.
That sub-mandate is the closest thing this sector has to guaranteed demand. It is also the reason the e-fuels conversation is moving faster than the general hydrogen conversation: somebody is legally obliged to buy the product, and there is currently very little of it being made anywhere in Europe. A country with renewable electricity, biogenic CO₂ and a pipeline route to Central Europe is not a marginal candidate to supply it.
What this means for the Latvian hydrogen ecosystem
For Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders, the practical translation of this argument is fairly blunt. Projects that can name a European offtaker will attract capital faster than projects that can only name a capacity figure. Corridor access, carbon sourcing and permitting timelines are now competitive variables, not administrative details. And the case Latvia makes in Brussels is stronger when it is framed as supply security for someone else rather than as a domestic climate target.
Self-sufficiency keeps the lights on. It does not make a country indispensable. The opportunity Liepiņš describes is the second one — and unlike bacon and butter, the window for it is open right now.