Europe and Renewable Energy - the Supergrid

Another exciting development in Europe, which came up a couple of times at the UPEC conference, is the prospect of the European Supergrid. What is that you may ask? To illustrate and give you an understanding of the possibilities that arise with a Supergrid, I want to start with an explanation on renewable energy systems on a small scale.

   For instance, an area which is not connected to a grid of any sort receives a lot of sunlight. The people living in this area decide that they want to harness this energy by having photovoltaic panels set up to generate electricity. This is great, but then comes the problem of night time. Electricity will be generated plentifully during the day and then none will be generated at night, meaning that electricity will be scarce at night. Now there are two options here, firstly: add energy storage to the system. This can come in many forms (I think I will do a post about electricity storage in the next week or so) but then there is the second option of diversifying and bringing a different type of energy generation into the mix, for instance wind power generation. PV power generation is diurnal and therefore most of the intermittency in generation occurs at night. There is also the possibility of cloudy days and days when sunshine is not at its maximum value. In contrast, wind is solely intermittent when the wind does not blow which is not necessarily a diurnal situation and more dependant on weather patterns. So therefore by combining the PV and wind power generation system, the times and reliant factors of generation have been spread and the system has become more reliable.

Now this system also has failings, as what happens if the wind is not blowing and it is night time or cloudy in that particular area? There is still insufficient energy being generated.

So, the idea of the supergrid is as follows: if we take all the areas of renewable energy generation all over Europe, onshore wind farms, offshore wind farms, geothermal generation, wave power, solar power, etc. and join them using a grid, including large amounts of hydro storage reservoirs to store energy, surely at every point in time there will be areas generating energy. Because it is spread out over such a large area, there will always be wind at some of the wind farms and weather conditions will be right for energy generation and with large amounts of storage, the reliability of the system is hugely increased. So, that is what's been proposed.

It seems that the first step of this supergrid is offshore wind power generation sharing between offshore wind farms in the North Sea. The following countries have signed an agreement to this effect: Belgium, Germany, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ireland. It is estimated that by 2030 this offshore grid could supply 150GW. The connections between these windfarms will be via HVDC cables.

I think that this is all very exciting. It makes a lot of sense to link these systems in this way to create a truely diverse network which would then need to rely less and less on conventional fossil fuel methods of power generation for base load reliability. I think it's going to be fantastic to see this unfold. It makes me think that there truely is space for us to be creative in our solutions for electrification, that we really need to thinking 'out of the box'. This is, however, a really expensive option and therefore  because of that and other political reasons including the stability of neighbouring countries, it will be important for us in South Africa to come up with our own solution to this problem. It does however, give us licence to 'think big'.

It also really shows that where national policy leads, it really is easier for more to be done.



Europe and Renewable Energy - UK

Interesting! So there are  many thoughts and plans afoot in Europe in terms of Renewable Energy. To start off with, let's talk about the UK. It seems that the UK has started and plans on going further along the path of offshore wind farms to supplement their energy generation methods and increase the renewable component of generation.
In 2007, the UK agreed to the EU goal of having 15% of the country's electricity generated by renewable means by the year 2020. They are looking to implement this by having about 33-35GW of wind power installed. At that point in time around 2.5 GW of wind power was installed, 2 GW of onshore and around 500MW offshore. In September this year, the UK passed the 5GW mark in terms of wind generation, with 1.2GW of  that being offshore wind energy.

While a number of onshore wind farms are still being installed, it is thought that this will soon be saturated and the emphasis has changed to offshore wind farms. While offshore wind farms are more expensive to build and install, they are less likely to be the target of environmental group fury and complaints, while being able to harness energy well.

In September this year, the government opened the largest offshore wind farm in the world with 100 turbines and covering an area of 35 square kilometres, thereby leaping it over the 5 GW wind power mark. This has also heralded the UK as the country with the most investment in offshore wind power, tipping them to become the leaders in this technology.

On a different note, the UK is also developing Smart Grid technology for the existing networks. Smart Grid technology in this context means smart meters in each household. Smart metres which control charging of electric cars, integration of small scale renewable generation for the household, energy storage, if applicable and with the possibility of further developments as the renewable network grows.
There seems to be a strong emphasis on electric cars as a viable alternative to conventional cars and the abundant use of these cars is also shaping the way that the UK is looking at its power future. The use of parked electric cars for energy storage and 'smart charging' - the ability of the system to schedule charging at low energy demand periods form some of these uses.

There is a strong emphasis in end user involvement in the process and in the movement towards efficient use of power and clean generation of power, which in my opinion is very exciting.
In addition, there is talk of an HVDC cable from Iceland to the UK, which could be a very interesting move too. There are other HVDC cables already installed in areas in the UK in particular in offshore wind farms connection with mainland UK and within the supergrid plans there are to be more HVDC cables. This is because the faults in HVDC cables actually decrease as the length of the cable increases, while in AC cables length increases cause an increase of faults in the cable. The cable from Iceland to UK would serve the purpose of connecting the geothermal power generation from Iceland to the growing demand for power in the UK.

All in all, the UK has some exciting things approaching as they work towards their goal for 2020. Some have said that they are putting too many eggs in one basket with their plans for off shore wind farms, but as it is currently a system that is working well for them, it is not a bad choice of investment. Perhaps after the following phase of off shore wind farms it would be important to look at diversifiying however, on the whole I think that the UK is looking quite holistically at the situation and making good decisions. I am interested to see how all of their plans will roll out.

UPEC Conference - An introduction

This year so far has been full of adventures and excitement, not least in that I have so far had two papers accepted for conferences and am awaiting acceptance on two more. The subject of this post and one or two more posts which I shall be putting up soon are the first conference where a paper of mine was accepted and which I was fortunate enough to attend and present my paper and another two papers from UCT on behalf of other students. The conference I am referencing is the UPEC conference of 2010. If you would like more information on the conference than what I write you can see more on the conference website: UPEC website.

UPEC is short of the Universities' Power Engineering Conference. This is an international conference which is now in its 45th year and which has become widely recognised and draws attendees from around the world.
I had the pleasure of meeting delegates from many areas in the UK, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, China, Germany, Ethiopia, Japan, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia and various other countries.

The main hall of Cardiff University

The conference was held in Cardiff, Wales this year at the University of Cardiff. The picture on the left is one that I took of the main hall at Cardiff University.

The title of the paper that I wrote and presented is entitled: The Importance of Energy Storage in Renewable Power Generation: A Review and will be published along with the conference proceeding in the IEEE library. In addition to this paper I presented a paper entitled: Prospects of Landfill Energy in Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa and its Impacts written by Wilfried Nguz, a colleague of mine, and second authored by myself and lastly presented a paper entitled: Value-Based Operational Strategy of CHP-Based Microgrid: A Comparative Analysis written by A. Basu, a colleague in India.

The Cape Town Contingent

The contingent from Cape Town included a Namibian MSc Student from the University of Stellenbosch, two Senior lecturers from the University of Cape Town, including my co-supervisor, a Professor from the UCT, a PhD student from the University of Mombasa currently studying at UCT and myself. Between the six of us, we presented the 16 papers accepted from UCT.

The conference was held over 4 days beginning with a day of tutorials. The topic of the tutorials for this conference was Off-shore Windfarms and people from industry as well as academics lectured during these tutorial sessions, giving large amounts of insight. The rest of the conference was split into parallel sessions where papers were presented by the authors of the papers and a chance for discussion of each paper was given, as is the typical layout for conferences. Thus ends this first post on the UPEC conference. In the next couple of posts, I will flesh out the interesting bits of what I learnt, who I met and ideas which came up during this time.

Proposal

I thought I'd add my master's project proposal to this blog to let you in on where I'm going to be going with this site:

Rural areas in South Africa face large challenges when it comes to electricity supply. Grid extension projects are time intensive and require a large capital investment. Non-grid electrification is an option in these areas, but must be sustainable and easily maintainable to give maximum energy supply efficiency for the area. As South Africa has a large amount of the resources needed for current renewable energy technology application, it has great potential for implementation of this kind. In addition to renewable energy techniques of energy generation being environmentally friendly, there is no necessity for fuels and therefore after initial capital investment, there are only minor operating costs associated with this. For rural environments, this is important. For non-grid electrification, different renewable energy technologies must be investigated to ascertain the most efficient and productive means of energy generation and distribution in each area to enable the area to be able to generate, store and distribute electricity and be come independent and self-sustainable. The implication of implementation of this scheme must then be considered.

This project has the objective of creating a tool for feasibility assessment and recommendations of renewable energy technologies in rural areas in South Africa. This would involve the development of a model which has a three-fold purpose, the first being to analyse information input about the demand area including population size, and load demand. As the load demand is variable, the maximum possible load must be calculated to ensure that the correct sizing of the system.

Using the data calculated from the above the second purpose of this tool can be executed. This is to consider renewable energy resources in the area and calculate the scheme that is best suited, in view of the energy demands calculated for that area. For the purposes of rural electrification, wind and solar renewable techniques are considered the most appropriate at this point in time as they are the most technologically mature options and have been proven in many applications and therefore the reliability of these methods are assured. Another aspect of this model would be energy storage. Because of the inherent intermittency of renewable energy techniques which are reliant on wind speed and irradiance levels, it is important to store energy when there is an excess and to be able to supply energy when there is insufficient being generated. The last aspect of this model would be a microgrid for the distribution of the energy generated. The tool would therefore take all these factors into account and model a system which met all these requirements based on the data obtained for the specified area.

Following initial model development, rural areas currently operating with off-grid electrification and renewable energy technology would be considered and assessed and the data collected used to refine the model created. Impacts of these schemes would then be assessed.

The model created would then be applied to a rural area within South Africa and recommendations made based on the scheme selected. Part of this project would involve outlining the implications of the implementation of the scheme, detailing skills needed, additional resources required, technologies to be used and possible difficulties foreseen.

So, that's where I'm going with this blog. Please let me know if there is anything that is unclear. As this is an initial proposal, there is the possibility that it will change over time as I discover more about each of these different areas and refine my ideas on them.

Here we go

Hello and welcome to my BLOG :)
This is a very exciting moment for me, as I've been thinking about this and umming and aahing for ages as to whether to do it and how to do it, so the moment is finally here, so...WELCOME.

As you can see from the 'About me' section of my blog, I am a student at the University of Cape Town doing a Masters of Engineering degree in Renewable Energy and Rural Electrification. I am funded by a fantastic scholarship named the Doug Banks Renewable Energy Vision, a scholarship that was started due to the untimely death of Doug Banks, a local hero in the Renewable Energy field. I feel honoured and privileged to have this scholarship especially because of the great man that I have found out that Doug Banks was. To see more about this, check out the Doug Banks Renewable Energy Vision website at: http://www.dougbanks.co.za

The aim of this blog is to be sharing some of what I'm learning, and to get others to catch the vision of the big picture for South Africa. I am passionate about change, about life transformation, about community transformation and about social transformation and I hope that in studying the topics that I am, I will be able to make informed decisions that can pave the way towards change in our country! I will try to keep posts entertaining and not too technical so this blog is accessible to those who are working in this field and for those who aren't but are interested in what is going on.

So, keep your eyes on this page and more facts and thoughts will be coming your way. Please feel free to comment, and add information as you like. I would love interaction with those of you who read this.

Thanks, Gaby