Sonia Dunlop, CEO of the Global Solar Council, explains what stakeholders across the energy ecosystem can learn in the aftermath of the electricity grid outage in Europe.
How we manage our electricity grids is changing fast.
No longer are our power highways a one way street. They are now a complex web of reverse flows, centralised and distributed generation, with many buildings and homes now making their own power.
Decisions on power generation are now not just made around boardroom tables, but also kitchen tables, as households make decisions on whether to invest in rooftop solar and storage and make themselves more resilient to future power cuts and adverse weather events.
The catastrophic failures of the Spanish and Portuguese grids last week are still being investigated. The causes are as yet unknown.
What is clear however is that we need to maximise flexibility in electricity systems. This comes in the form of battery storage, long duration storage, pumped storage hydro, green hydrogen, cross border grid interconnectors, electrification, flexible demand, dynamic time-of-use pricing and more.
Grid operators need quality data on the solar in their system. Google’s data streams from satellite and other data could potentially be transformational in this.
We must wait until Spanish and Portuguese investigators report on what happened to make a final judgement. But the incident this week highlights the importance of network interconnections to grid stability. The more interconnections that exist between power grids, the more stable the grids are. And, as we transition our grids to clean power sources with lower inertia, the importance of expanding interconnection grows. The Iberian peninsula’s limited interconnectivity of 3% of installed capacity (far below EU target of 15% by 2030) may have increased its vulnerability in the recent outage.
The Green Grids Initiative (GGI), an intergovernmental initiative, recognises that expanding interconnection is essential not only to facilitating cheaper energy through increased trading, but also to providing the grid stability needed to integrate renewable energy sources. Only through global cooperation and coordination on interconnectors can we deliver the net zero energy we need.
The COP29 climate conference in Baku set off a fantastic Global Energy Storage and Grids pledge that this week got the support of 60 governments and 100 companies around the world. All have committed to double investment in grids, build 25 million km of grid infrastructure and invest in 1,500 GW of energy storage, all by the end of the decade.
We need commitment and cooperation from across the ecosystem. Government and countries need to agree and prioritise increasing interconnection and energy trade. Grid operators all over the world to be working together to share best practice on how this is done. Especially the “GO15 “– the 15 biggest grid operators in the world.
Even households can play an increasingly important role in providing services to stabilise grids as smart meters and smart appliances increasingly empower them to adjust their consumption in line with supply.
There is no transition without transmission. We need to be thinking about regional renewable supergrids, that make the most of the resources across wide areas, as well as maximising self-consumption behind the meter.
Power cuts are not new. From the Texas power failure in 2021 to the 2003 blackout in Italy, this is not unique to renewables.
Throughout the 1970s, European countries struggled to maintain their grids during fuel shortages. In the UK, the issues were compounded by miners’ strikes that increased the vulnerability of coal and gas dependent systems. Even today, inadequate coal supplies undermine grid stability in South Africa and India, causing blackouts and load-shedding. The solution, for millions of Indians and South Africans, is rooftop solar and battery storage.
So no, we should not turn away from the cheap and safe renewable energy sources we have invested in. Instead, the lesson to be drawn is that there is an opportunity for stakeholders across the energy ecosystem to come together an invest more in the innovative storage and transmission infrastructure needed to provide clean, cheap and robust energy.
