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Europe should invest in electricity.

 

Solar panels
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. Despite Europe having younger and generally more resilient electricity grids than the US, he said, reserve capacity designed to offset shortages when the weather was 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. Solar capacity in the bloc has increased by 40 gigawatts this year, a 40 per cent increase on the new capacity added during 2021 and enough to supply 12mn homes, according to Solar-Power Europe.


Eon, one of Europe’s largest utilities, with operations in 20 European countries, has said that it plans to connect 37GW of new renewable to its networks by 2026, equivalent to the total amount of wind and solar capacity installed across Europe in 2021. It said «accelerating the deployment of new, and the strengthening of, electricity grids is an absolute priority, adding that Europe had under invested in its electricity infrastructure.

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Comments

  1. Dana12 December 2022 at 11:53

    He is right. The current grid will not be able to cope with all the new wind turbines and solar panels. This should and MUST be a priority in 2023 not later.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oliver12 December 2022 at 12:21

      Don't you love it when there are people with good intentions that unfortunately don't think about the whole picture? And then we get things like this. If the grid can't cope with the new additions then all those extra wind turbines and solar panels added are actually hurting us all.

      Delete
  2. Xavier12 December 2022 at 13:44

    I'm glad someone has started talking about this. I was considering it some time back, thinking the grid can't possibly hold for much longer. At the rate new solar panels/wind turbines are added I don't see it holding for more than another 2 years at maximum.

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