European ‘supergrid’ dream has merit / Modern Energy 2012/ Financial Times (FT)

[dave andrews]

Dear All, an article mentioning Czisch and his super grid concept.

 

Please note, that the Super grid does not, as is often wrongly implied by some contributors rely for its logic on the claim  "that by interconnecting large areas, there will always be wind somewhere". This is not the claim made by the supergrid proponents.

 

The logic of the Super grid is based on an assessment of the total cost against the total savings, which include less investment in capacity,, less spinning reserve, less severe and less frequently ramping, less operation of combustion plant, due to lower overall peak demand due to greater international diversity.  The detailed Czisch simulations show that the cheapest overall cost for power comes with 70% wind generation, the rest mainly existing hydro plus a small amount of combustion plant fired by biomass, and cheaper than Germany was paying for power a few years ago, and with now subsidy.

 

The fact that there is sometimes no wind over large parts of western Europe is irrelevant, since these weather occurrences have been included the years worth of 3 hour weather data modelled by Czisch, so I am puzzled why people keep bringing up these low wind occurrences as an issue.

 

Another popular false claim is that the Supergrid is somehow related to the Desertec proposal.  Again this is not the case as these two schemes are entirely separate.

 

Dave Andrews

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dr. Gregor Czisch <g.cz...@transnational-renewables.org>
Date: 2 June 2012 10:54
Subject: [America Renovable AR] Supply: European ‘supergrid’ dream has merit / Modern Energy 2012/ Financial Times (FT)
To: "America Renovable (AR)" <a...@lists.uni-kassel.de>
Cc: Sebastian Molina <smolin...@gmail.com>, Molina Molina Francisco <fmo...@ceu.es>


America Renovable (AR) lista de discussion para la proteccion del clima (The language for the discussion on AR is English.)

Dear members of America Renovable (AR),

There is a more and more lively debate about a European Supergrid for renewable energies.

Yesterday the Financial Times has published a little article about it also mentioning my work.

Is there any reasonable discussion going on in the field of the renewable Supergrid in South and Middle America?

Best regards,

Gregor Czisch

June 1, 2012 12:37 pm
Modern Energy 2012/ Financial Times (FT)

Supply: European ‘supergrid’ dream has merit
By Michael Kavanagh

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/bcb0949a-a4d1-11e1-9a94-00144feabdc0.html

Discussions between UK energy minister Charles Hendry and Iceland’s ambassador about the concept of exporting geothermal electricity derived from Iceland’s active volcanic system may strike some as fanciful.

True, geothermal energy along with hydropower supplies much of Iceland’s domestic electricity and hot water requirements, helping heat the pavements of its capital Reykjavik during winter.

But exploiting Iceland’s abundance of naturally derived energy would require the small matter of building the world’s longest interconnector to date, which would need to span 1,800 kilometres of seabed across the North Atlantic.

Laying cables of such length is no insurmountable engineering challenge – after all, telegraph cables have spanned the globe for a century or more. But the conundrum facing those seeking to transmit electricity over such long distances is the loss of power that quickly makes such projects uneconomic.

But the prize of smoothing out Europe’s electricity demand and reducing peak-load generation requirements, as well as exploiting cheaper and greener power sources, is driving attempts to extend and improve Europe’s grid system.

Steve Holliday, chief executive of the UK’s National Grid, argued the concept of transmitting power from Iceland – derided by some – remained largely hypothetical, though deserving of consideration, as he unveiled results in May.

But of more interest to National Grid, which is scheduled to spend £31bn on the UK’s “motorway system” of energy transmission and distribution infrastructure over the next two decades, are proposals of extending grid hookups closer to home in Europe that would improve the resilience of Britain’s energy supplies.

National Grid is already partner in two subsea interconnector projects allowing for electricity transmission from France and the Netherlands. It has also actively looked at plans for links to Norway and Ireland’s grid systems.

Such schemes reflect attempts by many European countries to tackle the problem of delivering peak domestic energy demand through extending power-sharing agreements with neighbouring countries rather than relying solely on domestic generation.

But the notion of the UK and others tapping Iceland’s geothermal potential is just one element of a futuristic vision of a super grid stretching across Europe and beyond long advocated by Gregor Czisch.

In this “supergrid max” scenario, power generated from traditional sources, but particularly fast-developing developing wind power, solar and biomass projects, would be fed across Europe and north Africa via an extensive grid of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) links that would require the building of additional interconnectors between existing national grids.

In reality, the merging together of plans for Europe’s new power generation and transmission systems is happening in a more piecemeal way.

The North Seas Countries Offshore Grid Initiative is a project between European Union states and Norway proposing a series of inter connectors across the North Sea. These would allow for the connection of remote offshore wind farms and also allow for the transmission of hydro power from Norway to the UK and other northern European countries.

But a key issue for those advocating the extending of grids in Europe involves not just overcoming the regulatory and commercial challenges of trading power across borders, but also dealing the technical problems of long-distance transmission.

Simon Cowdroy, head of grid services at engineering consultancy WSP Future Energy, says the adoption of alternating current (AC) as the standard transmission system across Europe has created constraints for new energy sources such as offshore wind power.

Though AC transmission is acceptably efficient up to 60 or 70km, the power loss through cabling beyond this distance makes conventional power transmission uneconomic.

“The efficiency of AC cabling declines rapidly after these distances,” says Mr Cowdroy, who has advised the UK government on the development of offshore grids for wind farms.

The solution is to use high-voltage DC which means “you don’t have these cable loses to the same scale. Beyond 60 or 70km, it’s DC.”

But even if high-voltage DC transmission is more technically feasible over longer distances, “it still needs to be cost effective”. And hooking in DC supplies to an AC grid presents its own technical problems and additional expense, militating against projects below a certain scale.

But, if HVDC can overcome the physical limitations of AC transmission in an economic way, then a North Sea grid could deliver “one of the holy grails – to connect to Norway, gaining access to its hydropower that can act as a giant battery for Europe,” he says.

A less dramatic extension of a mishmash of interconnectors, whether based on AC or DC systems, would also provide more prosaic advantages than simply allowing for remote wind, solar, hydro and geothermal power to be corralled into Europe’s carbon-fuel and nuclear dominated electricity systems.

“The driver [for grid integration] is the price differential and the creation of a single European market for electricity,” says Mr Cowdroy.

“The UK and Ireland remain quite isolated, then you have continental Europe, which is quite well connected, and the Nordic block of Norway Sweden and Finland, which co-operates on power.”

“The question is, why invest in more capacity to deal with peak load when you can access that power from across Europe?”

The UK already enjoys limited existing power transmission capacity with France and the Netherlands, and plans for more would allow, through sheer economies of scale, more smoothing of supply and demand across a broader market should pricing mechanisms allow.

“A European supergrid has merit, and one assumes it will emerge in some form,” says Mr Cowdroy.

His caution over how quickly Europe and its peripheral neighbours in the north Atlantic and north Africa might seek to pool its energy resources may appear sensible. But at a conference in March organised by Friends of the Supergrid, Frank Schettler, in charge of HVDC and supergrid issues at Siemens, argued that yet further advances could be expected in DC cabling that already allows for transmission at more than 320 Kilovolts. This could allow for a rapid acceleration in the rollout of a European-wide grid.

Achieving still higher voltages on DC systems would allow for yet greater efficiencies in pushing geographically remote energy sources to where they are most needed. According to Mr Schettler’s paper: “There are no technology ‘show-stoppers’ to the development of a European supergrid.”

--

 

Dr.-Ing. Dipl.-Phys. Gregor Czisch
Transnational Renewables Consulting
Hermannstr.3 / 34117 Kassel / Germany

Mobil +49 (0) 163 826 7921
Fax +49 (0) 561 103095

Startseite zu einigen Folien, Daten und Veröffentlichungen 
http://transnational-renewables.org/Gregor_Czisch/Home.htm

Vorträge und Veröffentlichungen / Presentations and Publications
http://www.transnational-renewables.org/Gregor_Czisch/veroeffentlichungen.html

Medienspiegel / In The Media
http://www.transnational-renewables.org/Gregor_Czisch/Medienspiegel.html

Ausgesuchte Veröffentlichungen / Selected Publications

Dissertation: Szenarien zur zukünftigen Stromversorgung - Kostenoptimierte Variationen zur Versorgung Europas und seiner Nachbarn mit Strom aus erneuerbaren Energien
     https://kobra.bibliothek.uni-kassel.de/handle/urn:nbn:de:hebis:34-200604119596
     https://kobra.bibliothek.uni-kassel.de/bitstream/urn:nbn:de:hebis:34-200604119596/1/DissVersion0502.pdf
Low Cost but Totally Renewable Electricity Supply for a Huge Supply Area
     http://transnational-renewables.org/Gregor_Czisch/projekte/LowCostEuropElSup_revised_for_AKE_2006.pdf
Effects of Large-Scale Distribution of Wind Energy in and around Europe
     http://transnational-renewables.org/Gregor_Czisch/projekte/Risoe200305.pdf
Global Renewable Energy Potential and Approaches to its Use
     http://transnational-renewables.org/Gregor_Czisch/folien/magdeb030901/overview.html
High wind power penetration within huge catchment areas shown in an European example
     http://transnational-renewables.org/Gregor_Czisch/projekte/awea_2001_czisch_ernst.pdf

 

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Dave Andrews

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