The world’s power grids need a major upgrade to keep pace with growing rates of electrification and the ever-increasing energy demands of big data. A cleaner energy landscape means a whole lot more electricity demand, as we switch from gas-powered vehicles and appliances to newer, cleaner models that need to plug into the grid to charge. This means that expanding grid capacity and making our aging grids smarter and more flexible will be essential to maintaining energy security for the future – but grid infrastructure remains woefully neglected, and we’re already starting to see some of the fallout.
“To achieve countries’ national energy and climate goals, the world’s electricity use needs to grow 20% faster in the next decade than it did in the previous one,” states a 2023 report from the International Energy Agency. As a result, grids need to expand at an unprecedented rate. “Reaching national goals also means adding or refurbishing a total of over 80 million kilometres of grids by 2040, the equivalent of the entire existing global grid,” the report goes on to say.
Failure to prioritize investing in grid modernization and expansion poses a major threat to the clean energy transition and to energy security as grids become increasingly reliant on renewable energy sources. Solar and wind energy are variable, meaning that their production levels wax and wane according to factors that have nothing to do with demand trends. Plus, energy production is increasingly dispersed, especially so thanks to the proliferation of residential solar panels. These factors introduce an extra level of complexity for grids that were designed with just a few major utilities in mind, and with only one direction of energy flow.
All of this is already leading to some hiccups for grid stability. In Europe, where renewable expansion and EV adoption have soared, critical grid congestion and catastrophic blackouts have become an increasing issue. At the end of April, cascading grid failures in Spain and Portugal resulted in the worst blackout in European history, and highlighted how woefully insufficient grid investment has been to date. At the time, Eurelectric reported that the “extraordinary event” in Iberia served as “a stark reminder that the grid is the backbone of our society. With electricity playing an increasingly important role in our society, we need to create all the conditions to enable a secure electricity supply.”
Unfortunately, many countries are now facing the consequences of failing to create all of those conditions. In the Netherlands, massive success with clean energy capacity installation and EV adoption without commensurate grid infrastructure expansion has resulted in a new norm of power cuts and energy consumption austerity measures. And it’s going to take a lot of money and time to fix the issue.
"They have a grid crisis because they haven't invested enough in their distribution networks, in their transmission networks, so they are facing bottlenecks everywhere, and it will take years and billions of dollars to solve this," Damien Ernst, professor of electrical engineering at Belgium's Liege University, recently told the BBC. The problem is causing ripples throughout the Netherlands economy. New housing, for example, is now facing long waiting lists in order to connect to grids that are already operating over maximum capacity.
But the issue is not limited to the Netherlands. Much of Europe has neglected to properly invest in grid infrastructure as a part of national clean energy planning. "We have an enormous amount of solar panels being installed, and they are installed at a rate that is much, much too high for the grid to be able to accommodate," Ernst went on to say.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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