National Grid and Scottish Power
Transmission have awarded a £1bn contract for first ever sub sea electricity
link between Scotland and England. The 2,200MW High Voltage Direct Current link will be a vital reinforcement- bringing
energy from renewable sources in Scotland to the south and helping to meet 2020
renewable targets. It will run 420km between Hunterston in Ayrshire to the
Wirral- the longest link of this capacity in the world. It should be fully
operational by 2016.
There are already about 3 GW of
interconnector links to France and the Netherlands, but nine more are either in
construction, planning or subject to feasibility studies. The next to open, in
autumn 2012, will be a link between the Republic of Ireland and Wales. Then
there is a 1 GW Kent-Belgium link, planned for 2018 and maybe a 1.4 GW link to
Norway, 900km, by 2019. Another would link England to Alderney, where very
strong tides could produce large amounts of electricity, and then on to France.
Energy Minister Charles Hendry has also
been negotiating with Iceland over the possibility of connecting the UK to its
abundant geothermal energy, via a 1000 km plus undersea High Voltage Direct
Current supergrid.. That may be some way off, but, with the other projects, a ‘supergrid’
network may be gradually taking
shape- and it can link up to, and help balance, offshore wind farms in the North
Sea. By 2020 there could be 18GW of offshore wind capacity in place, with more to
follow. They will all need grid links.
Supergrid interconnectors are costly. The
Britain-Netherland 240km link, which opened in 2011, cost £500m. But we have
the best wind, wave and tidal resource in Europe, so we should be able to
produces large amount of excess electricity and sell it abroad. More than
offsetting the cost of the interconnector
and more than offsetting the need to occasionally have to import
balancing power when UK wind is low.
The supergrid would eventually be EU wide,
linking to the large hydro capacity in Norway and elsewhere, with the
reservoirs acting as stores for
excess wind derived power, and it
may even possibly extended it to the large yet to be developed solar resource
in North Africa. www.desertec.org/ This wide geographical spread
should ensure that power would be available even when the whole of Northern
Europe is temporarily becalmed.
Similar ideas have emerged elsewhere. The
Japan Renewable Energy Foundation
and the Desertec Foundation have teamed to promote an Asian Supergrid
that would connect the national grids of Japan, Korea, China, Mongolia and
Russia. This could open up opportunities for renewable energy development in
which the power produced could be moved to where it is needed most. So Japan,
with fewer areas in which to build renewable projects, could benefit from wind
power produced in placed like Inner Mongolia, where potential capacity far
exceeds demand. There a have also been proposals for a major Concentrated Solar
Power project in the Gobi desert,
which straddles China and Mongolia. Excess electricity (around 1GW) from the
Gobitec project would be exported to urban centers in China, Japan, and South
Korea via a new network of nearly 4,000 km of high-voltage direct current
(HVDC) transmission lines. .http://www.gobitec.org/
There can obviously be problems with mega
projects like this, as I have explored in a recent paper: . http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2012.04.001
Some have argued that it’s foolish to try
to go remote sources, and
concentrate, and then transmit over long distances, energy that is naturally
distributed everywhere. It’s
also argued that it could
degenerate into a neo-colonial resource grab, with poor areas being exploited
by rich energy hungry countries, who might then not develop their own
renewables sources. That clearly has to be resisted: the
host country should have priority
access and only excess power exported. And we have to avoid imported supergrid power being seen as
alternative to locally produced power. We need all the types of renewable
energy development, at all scales, for a sustainable future. But as far
as the planet is concerned, it doesn’t matter where the energy projects are
built as long as they avoid emissions, and in energy and carbon terms, it makes
sense to go to where the resources are best. So we need to face up to the
political problems and start to think outside of national boxes.
