Why we are heading for a globally connected electricity system based on renewable energy
a global electricity system is slowly developing, so home-sited renewables are needed to protect British energy security
Slowly but surely the world is creeping towards global interconnection. That could make a global 100 per cent renewable energy system work a lot better. There would be reductions in the amount of storage needed and consequent reductions in cost. That is what academics are saying, including work done by electrical engineers based at the University of Birmingham (UK). Put simply, different parts of the world could power each other at different times of the day and night.
Solar power will become the dominant energy source. As Professor Christian Breyer says: ‘yes, solar & battery will be the central backbone of global energy supply, even more so in the sunbelt where two-third of world population live’. ‘Globalism’ will rule the electricity delivery system. Globalism already exists in the form of the international oil, and increasingly, natural gas industry. However, now with the development of HVDC transmission systems which minimise grid-based power losses, electricity can be transported efficiently over very great distances.
But the incremental march of international electricity interconnections is gradually pushing us in the direction of a global electricity system. It is happening incrementally. A new globalism based on renewable energy has great advantages, according to academics who have modelled the concept.
Of course, we should strive for energy security in the UK. This means wind power especially in the UK, supplemented by as much solar power as we can generate. Other renewable energy resources are potentially substantial in the UK. This includes geothermal energy, tidal stream energy and wave power, all of which are in greater or lesser stages of development. Of course the more renewables are deployed in the UK, the more we shall be able to profit from international trading in renewable energy.
As I say in my recently published book ‘Energy Revolutions’ (pages 36-37):
‘One interesting approach is to imagine providing 100 per cent of energy from renewables in the context of a globally interconnected electricity system. This would have the advantage of connecting areas where it is daytime with areas where it is night, as well as more and less windy zones. In recent decades, new engineering solutions for interconnection involving high-voltage direct current have emerged. These allow the possibility of (economically) transmitting electricity across thousands of miles while minimising electricity losses. A group of researchers has modelled the possibilities for a global system to provide 100%RE. They concluded that, compared to systems that are not globally interconnected, a globally interconnected system would reduce storage costs for 100%RE by 50 per cent and reduce the costs by 20 per cent.’
Incremental progress towards global interconnection is happening. I’m not necessarily talking about much-publicised plans to connect up the UK directly with solar pv from North Africa - that may or may not happen in some form or other sometime in the future - and perhaps never at all in a direct sense. Really, discussion of plans like that trivialises discussion about increasing international links in electricity supply.
What I am rather talking about, for the moment are the plans, which have begun to be implemented, to connect up North Africa and with southern Europe. Developments like that could lead to greater linkage of British electricity systems. On the one hand, British international electricity interconnection with the continent of Europe is expanding and on the other hand, African interconnection with European states is also occurring. But this will be indirect, rather than direct, connections between the UK and Africa.
The latest incremental change in the progress towards completion of the interconnector between Crete and Attica. Meanwhile, the European Commission is offering financial backing to interconnector projects between Italy and Tunisia, one between Egypt and Greece, and another between Greece, Cyprus and Israel. This programme runs parallel with the European Commission target that member states should have interconnections worth at least 15 per cent of their national electricity consumption by 2015.
The UK, if anything, is expanding rather faster than this, with the bulk of our current (9.8 GW) of international interconnector capacity having been commissioned since 2010. According to OFGEM new international interconnectors are set to increase this capacity by over 50 per cent by 2030. These are all projects with our neighbours: Norway, Ireland, Denmark, France, Germany and Belgium.
Of course we are still some way off having a globally interconnected system. However the spread of renewable energy which is building up to an astonishingly rapid rate is turbocharging the growth of interconnectors. This is because the variable nature of renewable energy encourages greater interconnection.
Globalism is slowly happening in electricity interconnection, perhaps not through dramatic direct projects, but gradually. Britain has a stake in this in that it can export renewable energy production, thus reducing excess renewable energy production. We should continue our practice of issuing fixed price contracts for renewable energy to enure that UK consumers get a good deal. But a global system of interconnection will reduce the need to store so much energy because it can import excess renewable energy from other places - perhaps places which are thousands of miles away.
It makes eminent sense to build solar panels across the equatorial regions and transmit that power North and South. Im not into that mad as hatter link from Morocco to England that's just setting us up for 3rd party interference.
This is a very fascinating topic for me; however, a globally-connected green energy system is very much like (and related to) world peace. My biggest fear is that the conditions of both are at best aspirational and at least unsettling for the great mass of humans. Our focus for building anew our energy systems needs to change in order to achieve stability..
Green energy connections and resources between the countries of Europe have been increasingly shared for years and we have traded energy in the form of fossil fuels for well over a century all over the globe. Central controls on different parts of the system, resource scarcity and politics have typically been instruments of war, international disruption and manipulation.
The key to addressing energy for our future is not just global interconnection but instead turning our focus away from big, centralized generators toward task-oriented needs on an individual basis, where energy is generated from billions of individual resource points and any surplus shared. This interconnection should be modeled after the internet with no central point of input or export--everyone meets their own needs and shares into the grid.
We need to build self-sufficient energy generation systems into each house, building or neighborhood, explore green generation and distribution options and innovations from natural connecting features like oceans and air, and forget about generation and distribution systems that trap large populations into a dependence on massive, expensive, vulnerable and centralized energy providers.