In a series of blogs, Eddie O’Connor will examine how Europe will meet it’s Paris decarbonisation goals.
In this blog post, Eddie discusses how the renewable resources discussed in Blog Post 2 can be harnessed and used to power our society.
I recognised in 2001 that there was one problem with wind energy when it comes to meeting customer demand. That is that electricity can be made from wind only when the wind speed is greater than 4 to 5 m/s. Although it is producing electricity approximately 95% of the time, output depends on wind speed, which constantly varies. A wind turbine operates at maximum output in wind speeds above 11 m/s normally.
Solar PV emerged in 2009 as a cost-effective way of capturing natural free energy. Not only is solar variable but it is intermittent, insofar as the sun doesn’t shine at night.
As originally conceived the Supergrid was proposed as a partial solution to variability.
Consider the following situation:
A storm arrives in Northern Europe tracking South West to North East. Without profound interconnection the following happens. As the storm travels from country to country wind output begins to increase, reaching a peak and then declining as the storm moves away.
Output follows the same pattern in each country over which the storm passes. This leads to massive variability in the output of all generators in the individual systems. Existing fossil generators operate at their most efficient when their generation is constant.
If all the countries of Europe were linked with profound interconnectors then the pattern of generation from wind would look like this:
There would be other advantages arising from profound interconnection: each individual country has to hold a certain quantum of plant on standby to cater for variability in customer demand. With interconnection an individuals nations plant would be capable of servicing a number of countries. This plant is always the most expensive to operate, so the less of it that is needed the cheaper the unit of electricity for the customer. And so during the transition phase which we are in at the moment and will be for some time cheaper electricity is always a goal.
Although the Supergrid began as a way of coping with variability, it has now morphed into something much more important. Without it
- the massive offshore wind resource cant be accessed
- the solar resource of the Mediterranean basin would be an isolated nation state solar production with all the variability and lack of night time power that that entails
- there cannot be a link up between the solar resource of the Mediterranean basin and the great northern wind resource
- each country in Europe cannot achieve it’s Paris goals of decarbonisation without it
it is a fair question to ask “Why should the Northern wind and the Med. solar be linked up?”
There is a complementarity that exists if they are linked. During the Summer days the solar output from the Med. area is at its maximum. At this time it is possible that output from Northern wind is low. There would be a substantial quantity of solar powered electricity transferred from south to North. The opposite would be the case in winter with electricity flowing in the opposite direction.
Of course there will need to be storage, but it will be greatly reduced with a well designed Supergrid. The optimisation of Wind and solar will reduce the amount of storage that would be required.
