Mar 31 2010

From Smart Grid to SuperSmart Grid

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Engineers and planners at utilities across the country are laboring mightily to get a handle on the technical, operational and financial requirements of Smart Grid, a vision of leveraging the power of information to provide more affordable, reliable and environmentally sustainable service to electricity customers. Creating a smarter grid, the experts at PG&E tell me, is an evolutionary process that will take years to implement.

But they'll have to hurry to keep up with the all the visionaries who are creating future road maps for the industry. Smart Grid is already in danger of becoming passe, before anyone has even built one.

This week a group of international energy and climate experts, assembled by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, unveiled a major study calling for creation of a "SuperSmart Grid" to power all of Europe and North Africa entirely by renewable energy by 2050.

Today only about 15 percent of Europe's power comes from renewable resources, mostly traditional hydropower. This plan would require decomissioning vast numbers of fossil-fuel power plants, starting around 2030, and tapping instead:

• the enormous solar potential of southern Europe and the deserts of North Africa
• the hydro capability of Scandinavia and the European alps
• onshore and offshore wind farms in the Baltic and North Sea
• the continent’s ocean tidal and wave power, and 
• biomass generation across Europe

“Climate change requires an ambitious vision and collaboration across borders and boundaries we have not previously envisaged," said Antonella Battaglini of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one of the contributors. "If we don’t examine the art of the possible, we will never inform critical policy decisions that need to be made sooner rather than later. This study represents a major milestone in the effort of unravelling the Gordian knot of policy, and finding workable solutions to the EU’s power supply, security and carbon challenges.”

The report is a bit vague about the price tag for all this, but says reassuringly that "the short-term costs of transforming the power system may not be very large." It assumes that expansion of renewable energy technologies (particularly wind and solar thermal) will dramatically reduce their costs to become competitive with fossil fuels--a debatable proposition (in the absence of large carbon taxes).

The report also notes that a "true SuperSmart Grid" will require high-capacity transmission lines to be built between North Africa and Europe--as well as a major upgrade of transmission capacity within each region. "There are not yet any estimates available as to the system requirements and the associated investment costs," it concedes.

It's easy to produce road maps like this if you don't have to take the steering wheel. It's also easy to take potshots at such armchair visionaries, but that would miss the point. Building a SuperSmart Grid may take a lot longer and cost a lot more than these promoters acknowledge, but I'm glad someone is starting to point us in the right direction, so we can at least get started. 

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