North Sea neighbours are planning green electricity grid
06.01.2010 / Wind parks at sea are to be coupled to hydropower plants. Aim: no more downtime with electricity flow.
Hamburg. Future power supply in Europe is starting to take shape with the announcement of another major project. The North Sea neighbouring countries’ and Ireland’s joint green electricity grid for connecting offshore wind parks to coastal hydropower plants should significantly advance the development of renewable energy. “The aim is the rapid expansion of renewable energy and their integration into an efficient power grid”, said the Minister for Economics Rainer Brüderle yesterday. According to Brüderle the ministries and experts from eight participating EU countries and Norway want to set priorities for the project's development in the first half of 2010.
Similar to the Desertec project, the planned development of large solar plants in North Africa and its connection to Europe, it involves using renewable energy on a large scale in the next few decades. With this, power supply in Europe could be converted step by step into ultimately being purely regenerative-based, although this is of course only possible in the long-term. The European Wind Energy Association EWEA estimates that it will take about ten years alone and cost about 30 billion Euros to build an underground grid in the North Sea.
The German WindEnergy Association welcomes the announcement of the European offshore initiative, spokesperson Ulf Gerder points out, however, that the majority of wind power plants today and in the future will be onshore: “This remains the core of our industry”, he said. Across Europe the current installed wind power capacity of 75,000 megawatts will increase to about 230,000 megawatts in 2020. “About 80 percent of this will be onshore and new grid structures have to be created for this as well. It is important to replace the current structure of central large power plants with decentralised supply.”
A significant problem with renewable energy has until now been that only some of them are consistently available, that is biomass and the yield from hydropower plants, including tidal power plants increasingly in the future. Energy supplies from wind power plants and solar plants however fluctuate with the quantity of wind and the change from day to night. This shortcoming can be overcome by stores, for example by pumped-storage plants at reservoirs or by networking thousands of individual plants of different technologies in a larger region.
Germany’s largest operator, the energy group RWE from Essen welcomed yesterday's announcement about the North Sea grid project: “This means another boost for renewable energy”, said spokesperson Annett Urbaczka. Innogy, a subsidiary of RWE is one of the leading German companies on the renewable energy market.
Hamburg. Future power supply in Europe is starting to take shape with the announcement of another major project. The North Sea neighbouring countries’ and Ireland’s joint green electricity grid for connecting offshore wind parks to coastal hydropower plants should significantly advance the development of renewable energy. “The aim is the rapid expansion of renewable energy and their integration into an efficient power grid”, said the Minister for Economics Rainer Brüderle yesterday. According to Brüderle the ministries and experts from eight participating EU countries and Norway want to set priorities for the project's development in the first half of 2010.
Similar to the Desertec project, the planned development of large solar plants in North Africa and its connection to Europe, it involves using renewable energy on a large scale in the next few decades. With this, power supply in Europe could be converted step by step into ultimately being purely regenerative-based, although this is of course only possible in the long-term. The European Wind Energy Association EWEA estimates that it will take about ten years alone and cost about 30 billion Euros to build an underground grid in the North Sea.
The German WindEnergy Association welcomes the announcement of the European offshore initiative, spokesperson Ulf Gerder points out, however, that the majority of wind power plants today and in the future will be onshore: “This remains the core of our industry”, he said. Across Europe the current installed wind power capacity of 75,000 megawatts will increase to about 230,000 megawatts in 2020. “About 80 percent of this will be onshore and new grid structures have to be created for this as well. It is important to replace the current structure of central large power plants with decentralised supply.”
A significant problem with renewable energy has until now been that only some of them are consistently available, that is biomass and the yield from hydropower plants, including tidal power plants increasingly in the future. Energy supplies from wind power plants and solar plants however fluctuate with the quantity of wind and the change from day to night. This shortcoming can be overcome by stores, for example by pumped-storage plants at reservoirs or by networking thousands of individual plants of different technologies in a larger region.
Germany’s largest operator, the energy group RWE from Essen welcomed yesterday's announcement about the North Sea grid project: “This means another boost for renewable energy”, said spokesperson Annett Urbaczka. Innogy, a subsidiary of RWE is one of the leading German companies on the renewable energy market.