A EUROPEAN offshore electricity Supergrid linking wind farms from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean will be proposed this week by Airtricity, the renewable energy company. The Irish company and ABB, the Swedish engineering group, will present the €20 billion (£13.7 billion) initial phase of its project this week to MPs in an effort to get political backing for a scheme that would create Europe’s first extensive cross-border power network.
The first phase of the Supergrid would comprise 2,000 wind turbines located in the southern part of the North Sea, between Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. Generating 10 gigawatts of power, the giant wind farm could supply electricity to eight million homes.
More importantly, the company says, a power grid would be established, connecting the electricity supply networks of three countries, removing the biggest hurdle to cross-border competition in electricity.
Eddie O’Connor, Airtricity’s chief executive, reckons that the Supergrid would not only supply large quantities of sustainable power but also would overcome a major obstacle to a joined-up European energy policy. “Europe has been trying to create a single market in energy for 20 years and failed dismally. Most of Europe’s electricity is supplied by very big, vertically integrated monopolies. They are not very efficient, not very entrepreneurial and they rely on fossil fuels,” Mr O’Connor says.
The Supergrid would provide access to an endless source of power and facilitate energy trading between countries, exploiting differences in consumption, he says. “Countries need electricity at different times. The peak in Germany’s electricity demand is an hour before the UK.”
Airtricity, which is developing a 500-megawatt wind farm in the Thames Estuary, has discussed the Supergrid proposal with the Department of Trade and Industry, as well as Andris Pibalgs, the European Energy Commissioner.
The scale of the project is the key to its potential value, Mr O’Connor says, because it resolves the principal weakness of wind-turbine generated electricity: it’s intermittency. “Any one wind farm suffers from variability — it is on and off. With the Supergrid you don’t get peaks and troughs,” he says.
A cable linking a series of grids over 1,000km (620 miles) would stretch the length of an average weather front, collecting wind power as it passes each farm to create a constant stream of power for countries linked to the grid. According to Airtricity, the Supergrid would have a capacity utilitisation rate of 70 per cent, compared with about 40 per cent for individual wind farms.
Key to the success of the scheme is regulatory support and backing from a financial institution, such as the European Investment Bank (EIB), as well as industrial partners.However, Airtricity admits that the scale and regulatory complexity of the Supergrid make it high-risk and it does not expect commercial banks to support the project without the backing of European Union institutions, and a regulatory framework for the sale of wind power directly across borders.
