The development of a co-ordinated offshore European ‘supergrid’ will be essential for the UK to meet its renewable energy targets, according to a committee of parliamentarians.
The Energy and Climate Change Select Committee says that while development of a supergrid connecting Europe’s offshore renewable energy resources would be costly, it would provide both economic and environmental benefits.
In a report to parliament, the Committee says that the UK government should promote greater coordination of offshore interconnections in order to reduce the costs of renewable energy development. It believes that a supergrid could also provide vital support to the UK’s ageing onshore electricity network.
“The UK’s electricity system is the least interconnected of all European countries – but we also have vast offshore resources of renewable energy,” said Tim Yeo, Chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee. “If we continue developing these renewable resources site-by-site it could be prohibitively expensive with large individual connections for each power plant.”
The Committee’s report says that a supergrid will become increasingly necessary as fossil fuel generation is phased out in favour of renewable energy because it would allow network operators to balance supply and demand using resources from overseas.
The report has been welcomed by many in the utility industry. Eddie O’Connor, President of the Friends of the Supergrid and CEO of Mainstream Renewable Power, said that the Committee was “right to recognise the long term benefits to the UK of making Supergrid a reality”.
“The UK is an energy island with significant offshore reserves of renewables,” said O’Connor. “To harness these reserves for ourselves, and to enable us to trade them with our neighbours, will require the creation of the electricity equivalent of the oil and gas pipeline network that we have built over the last 40 years.”
According to the Committee, up to 280 wind farms are likely to be constructed in the North Sea in the next 20 years. The cost and size of these new assets would be prohibitive if single connections to the shore were made, says the report.
“Point to point interconnection schemes will provide fewer benefits to the UK grid and to consumers than a meshed interconnected network, as the Committee rightly points out,” said O’Connor. “Developing an interconnected network with its neighbours will enable the UK to provide secure, decarbonised and competitively priced electricity without the additional onshore works associated with storage, grid enhancement and balancing and reserve requirements.”
