Europe and Renewable Energy - the Supergrid

Another exciting development in Europe, which came up a couple of times at the UPEC conference, is the prospect of the European Supergrid. What is that you may ask? To illustrate and give you an understanding of the possibilities that arise with a Supergrid, I want to start with an explanation on renewable energy systems on a small scale.

   For instance, an area which is not connected to a grid of any sort receives a lot of sunlight. The people living in this area decide that they want to harness this energy by having photovoltaic panels set up to generate electricity. This is great, but then comes the problem of night time. Electricity will be generated plentifully during the day and then none will be generated at night, meaning that electricity will be scarce at night. Now there are two options here, firstly: add energy storage to the system. This can come in many forms (I think I will do a post about electricity storage in the next week or so) but then there is the second option of diversifying and bringing a different type of energy generation into the mix, for instance wind power generation. PV power generation is diurnal and therefore most of the intermittency in generation occurs at night. There is also the possibility of cloudy days and days when sunshine is not at its maximum value. In contrast, wind is solely intermittent when the wind does not blow which is not necessarily a diurnal situation and more dependant on weather patterns. So therefore by combining the PV and wind power generation system, the times and reliant factors of generation have been spread and the system has become more reliable.

Now this system also has failings, as what happens if the wind is not blowing and it is night time or cloudy in that particular area? There is still insufficient energy being generated.

So, the idea of the supergrid is as follows: if we take all the areas of renewable energy generation all over Europe, onshore wind farms, offshore wind farms, geothermal generation, wave power, solar power, etc. and join them using a grid, including large amounts of hydro storage reservoirs to store energy, surely at every point in time there will be areas generating energy. Because it is spread out over such a large area, there will always be wind at some of the wind farms and weather conditions will be right for energy generation and with large amounts of storage, the reliability of the system is hugely increased. So, that is what's been proposed.

It seems that the first step of this supergrid is offshore wind power generation sharing between offshore wind farms in the North Sea. The following countries have signed an agreement to this effect: Belgium, Germany, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ireland. It is estimated that by 2030 this offshore grid could supply 150GW. The connections between these windfarms will be via HVDC cables.

I think that this is all very exciting. It makes a lot of sense to link these systems in this way to create a truely diverse network which would then need to rely less and less on conventional fossil fuel methods of power generation for base load reliability. I think it's going to be fantastic to see this unfold. It makes me think that there truely is space for us to be creative in our solutions for electrification, that we really need to thinking 'out of the box'. This is, however, a really expensive option and therefore  because of that and other political reasons including the stability of neighbouring countries, it will be important for us in South Africa to come up with our own solution to this problem. It does however, give us licence to 'think big'.

It also really shows that where national policy leads, it really is easier for more to be done.