Where next for the supergrid?

[TheGreenOne]

Transmission is the talk of the town right now with various plans under discussion that could see a radical transformation of Europe’s electricity transmission system. These moves are being prompted by the realisation that if Europe is to meet its 2020 targets to increase its share of renewable energy to 20% of the total, a major contribution will have to come from renewable energy generated electricity. While this strategy certainly presents a number of significant challenges, with offshore wind expected to contribute a large proportion of this new renewable energy perhaps one of the largest is the issue of how to deliver this energy to the demand centres of Europe.A new generation of transmission system will not only allow significant quantities of offshore wind to be delivered, but will also enable the development of a far more liquid and physically interconnected European energy sector. This too has advantages that will enable the EU to more easily reach its energy policy objectives - focused on competitiveness, sustainability and security of supply. For instance, a fully interconnected energy sector will, in future, be able to balance volatility in say the UK’s large offshore wind portfolio with pumped storage capacity presented by Norway’s extensive hydro power portfolio. Indeed, in December 2010 European transmission system operator group ENTSO-E signed a Letter of Intent as part of the North Seas Countries Offshore Grid Initiative, which pledges to facilitate the strategic and coordinated development of power grids both on and offshore. At the time ENTSO-E president, Daniel Dobbeni observed: ‘The North Seas Countries Offshore Grid Initiative is a significant step in the direction of regional cooperation with a shared vision, concrete objectives and an ambitious, but also pragmatic action plan. It is based on a common understanding on the potential of the renewable energy sources of the North Seas in contributing to the EU Energy Policy goals.’ Christian Kjaer, European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) CEO, described the development as ‘an indispensable step to create an offshore electricity grid, critical for developing a single European market for electricity and for allowing offshore wind farms to plug into that grid.’The European Commission recently presented its energy infrastructure priorities for the next two decades, which it says are aimed at making networks fit for the 21st century.Commenting on the move Günther Oettinger, European Commissioner for Energy, said: ‘Energy infrastructure is key to all our energy goals: from security of supply, the integration of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency to the proper functioning of the internal market. It is therefore essential that we pull together our resources and accelerate the realisation of EU priority projects.’But can it be that massive and costly infrastructure projects are the only possible solution and do such projects need to be financed by the public purse? By way of example, Norwegian utilities E-CO Energi, Agder Energi (AE) and Lyse, Sweden’s Vattenfall, and a Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) are to investigate the feasibility of building a high voltage electricity link between the UK and Norway. The HVDC link will have a capacity of up to 2 GW and the ambition is interlink flexible hydro with intermittent energy sources such as wind power. And, in a recent report commissioned by Greenpeace from spe******t engineering consultancy Energynautics, the study - titled: ‘Battle of the Grids’ - concluded that smart grid management and control technology – together with a transmission network – can play a major role in reliably balancing the supply of variable renewable energy with demand across the continent.Furthermore, according to an interim report from the National Electromobility Platform’s Charging Infrastructure and Network Integration Working Group, Germany’s power grid could already handle one million electric vehicles, with the country’s utility industry convinced that the federal government’s objective of having roughly a million electric vehicles on its roads by 2020 would not pose any problems for the grid.The future development of smart grid technologies offers new opportunities, for instance by 2020, cable-free inductive charging and higher-voltage direct-current charging will make charging faster and more convenient, the report concludes.Thus it appears that the addition of new types of load (like electric vehicles) and the rapidly growth of intermittent generation resources (like renewables) are fundamentally transforming the energy system in unforeseen ways.It is with this in mind that we present the latest of our Big Questions: Is a supergrid necessary for Europe to meet its renewable energy policy goals? If so, how can this be achieved in a relatively short time frame and with clearly limited public and private resources. If a supergrid is not necessary, what will be required to integrate massive quantities of new renewable generation capacity into Europe’s aging electricity transmission system? As usual we invite respondents to present a 300-word response and for those wishing to be considered for publication in the print magazine we ask that you are identifiable, rather than anonymous.

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