Has anyone thought about the cost of “connecting and integrating” the grid? What about reserve backup? Even the CEO of Germany’s EON is now speaking out:
From the article:
Europe’s renewable power push will be a “big mistake” unless it significantly increases investment in the continent’s electricity grid to cope with mismatches in supply and demand, warns the chief executive of European energy major Eon.
Leonhard Birnbaum, who took over last month as president of Eurelectric, the European electricity industry body, said the accelerated installation of wind turbines and solar panels across the EU as the bloc tries to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels was creating bottlenecks that the grid was not designed to cope with.
To support the rapid increase in renewables, Eurelectric estimates that investment in the grid needs to increase by between 50 and 70 per cent to reach €34bn-€39bn a year by 2030.
“If we accelerate renewables, we need to accelerate the grid,” Birnbaum said. “If we accelerate renewables only, we are making a big mistake.”
Despite Europe having younger and generally more resilient electricity grids than the US, he said, reserve capacity designed to offset shortages when the weather is not optimal for renewable power was already stretched by the number of wind turbines and solar panels that had been brought online since the war in Ukraine started.
“We have been adding renewables, often using up reserves which we traditionally had in the grid . . . we built a system with lots of reserves. The reserve is gone,” Birnbaum said.
This is all about adding intermittent electricity to a grid designed primarily for baseload. For all the talk of solar and wind you can virtually hear a pin drop when it comes to discussion about baseload backup let alone how much this is all going to cost. Continue reading “Here’s the Real Cost of Going Green”
