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An EU Supergrid
At the inaugural meeting of the Union for the Mediterranean recently, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said “…in the Mediterranean region, concentrated solar power offers the prospect of an abundant low carbon energy source. Indeed, just as Britain’s North Sea could be the Gulf of the future for offshore wind, so those sunnier countries represented here could become a vital source of future global energy by harnessing the power of the sun”.
How realistic is this? Dr Gregor Czisch from the University of Kassel in Germany claims that it is possible to provide a 100% renewable power supply for Europe at competitive costs if we build a trans continental supergrid using High Voltage Direct Current links. It’s claimed that transmission losses with HVDC are low - about 2% per 1000 km. Then the EU could share renewable sources such as offshore wind farms in the North Sea- the EU has put the potential at 150 Giga Watt (GW) - and Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants in North Africa and the Middle East.
The later idea has already been floated by the DESERTEC group, and over 1GW of projects are already underway or planned in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordon, UAE and elsewhere, with, in some cases, under sea grid links to the EU also being planned. Some projects plan to have molten salt heat stores, to allow power generation to continue overnight. See http://www.desertec.org/
However, in the Czisch scenario, wind provides almost 70% of the energy, with over 1000GW of generating capacity installed, some of it in the North Sea, but some of it outside the EU, with electricity being brought in from wind projects in, for example, Kazakhstan, Russia and Southern Morocco, this wider footprint helping to compensate for local variations in wind availability. The wind resource in these regions is huge, with there being many hundreds of GWs potential in each. See: http://www.iset.uni-kassel.de/abt/w3-w/projekte/LowCostEuropElSup_revised_for_AKE_2006.pdf
The first stage might be Airtricity’s plan for a Supergrid running from Spain to the Baltic Sea, linking up countries around the North Sea and beyond, with a network of offshore windfarms at nodal points in the North Sea and off the West coast of the UK and Ireland. Their initial proposal is for a £20bn 10GW wind farm project in the southern part of the North Sea, with a 5 GW HVDC link carrying power west to the U.K, and a second 5GW line running east to continental Europe, perhaps to the Netherlands.
See http://www.airtricity.com/ireland/wind_farms/supergrid/.
This idea has also been taken up by Mainstream renewables http://www.mainstreamrp.com and by Norwegian transmission company Imera Power, who have announced plans for what they call a Europgrid: www.imerapower.com/EuropaGrid/EuropaGrid.htm
The European Commission has indicated interest in this approach, allocating €150m (£139m) for early work on a possible North Sea grid, and €100m (£93m) for a link between the Ireland and Wales to help renewables generators in Ireland access the UK energy market.
The idea also got strong support from a meeting of more than 100 leading European engineers, representing 21 European countries, brought together last November under the auspices of the Royal Academy of Engineering in London to discuss Europe’s renewables challenges.
Mega schemes like this do of course raise many issues. For example, about the security aspects of the supergrid and about the problems of negotiating grid link access across the whole continent. Some also worry that we would simply be switching from reliance on Middle Eastern oil and Russian gas to North African solar and eastern and southern wind. There is also the danger that EU governments might buy into this approach rather than sorting out energy problems at home- it could be used as an excuse for inaction. But, on the positive side, it could open up a vast new resource and provide income for some relatively poor areas on the periphery of the EU in the South and East- as long as the trading contracts negotiated were fair. One thing seems clear- the supergrid idea could open up not just a major new resource but also a new energy geopolitics.
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