The Desertec Industrial Initiative, based
in Germany, is all about ambitious plans for linking renewable energy projects
across the EU, Middle East and North Africa (EU-MENA) region via a supergrid,
to their mutual advantage. It says it can be done by 2050 and in a new report
lays out what it might mean. What
is very striking about their analysis are the assumptions about the huge growth
in energy demand in the ME and NA regions, and the scale of the renewable
resources that is available there, much more than in the
EU.
They say that Turkey and Egypt will have
the largest population and highest power demand in the MENA region in 2050 but
also that, due to high per capita consumption, Saudi Arabia will be of a
similar size in terms of power demand. ‘These three countries, together with
Jordan and Syria, make up about a third of total EUMENA demand – as much as the
four largest EU economies Germany, France, the UK and Italy together’.
They go on ‘Due to the high demand in the Middle East and Egypt, most
of the desert power produced there will be consumed locally’ and , since ‘unlike most of the major
economies in the center of Europe, the region enjoys good solar and wind
conditions’ they will not need imports.
However ‘given their
relatively small populations and abundant renewables resources, the Maghreb and
Libya export large quantities of power to Europe’. They will be what Desertec
calls ‘super producers’ while most of the rest are importers –countries with
large demand but relatively few renewable resources. e.g. Germany, Italy,
France and Turkey. But there are
some in between, i.e. countries with reasonable renewable resources, who
will need balancing top-ups.
Examples quoted are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Spain, the UK and Denmark.
The Desertec 2050 report argues that the
‘balancer’ countries ‘build just
as much renewables capacity as is economic to cover most of their domestic
load. Covering the remaining minor share of the load with domestic renewables
becomes less economical, since curtailment of excess energy would occur.
Consequently, these countries import power when needed and export it when their
production exceeds domestic demand. They thereby avoid building the final
segment of domestic renewables, which would make the sustainable power system
more expensive due to high curtailment’.
Not everyone will agree with that analysis,
or therefore the need for some EU countries to import perhaps 20% of their
power from the south, while still using some gas, as Desertec sees
importers as doing . ‘Since gas, and thereby carbon emissions, are
allocated under a common cap to where they are needed most, the countries with
limited renewables can use more gas than in an isolated system.’
This sounds dangerously like special
pleading by Germany to be allowed to continue to use gas! However, the Desertec report says that
it will all balance out equitably: ‘While super producers, balancers and
importers profit from system integration in a different way, they all benefit
from being part of a large sustainable power system. At the same time, their
complementary roles lead to a situation of mutual reliance, in which no one
country is dependent on another but instead each country is reliant on the
system as a whole’.
Well maybe, but I can see plenty of
potential for conflict, and certainly a need for a lot of detailed
negotiations. It could make the current battles over the euro and national
debts look easy! It certainly does open up a new geopolitical perspective, based
on sharing renewable energy resources to mutual gain.
In reality though this wont be cooperative
sharing, but would be driven by
market forces and the interests of
the big investors in what after
all will be a huge project. Can it
be set up to avoid market power becoming monopolised? Should competition be restrained or increased? Could
the supergrid be run as common service?
There are plenty of political issues to get
sorted before it’s too late; unless that is you think the whole idea should be
opposed. Certainly some
environmentalists do not like large scale centralised systems- and would prefer
the emphasis to be on the local scale. However, the big and the small are not
really in conflict technologically- they could in fact be mutually reinforcing,
enabling variable local supplies to feed into and be balanced by wider grid
links. In essence it’s like the internet- a grid system serving a range of decentral nodes. But there could be conflicts over
funding- big projects may attract big money to the detriment of small projects.
That would be tragic since we need to develop renewables fully at both scales.
What happens next? Most likely the
supergrid will emerge piecemeal, with a few links here and there, between the
UK and the continent and within the EU (see my earlier Blog) and possibly
across the Med, with no central plan or agreement. A bit like how national electricity supply systems in
the UK and elsewhere first emerged. That could be chaotic and wasteful. But
where is the central authority to impose rational plan? Not the EU/EC surely!
www.dii-eumena.com/desert-power-2050/
