Planning renewable energy: from local to European level

In 2008, leading politicians from around the EU agreed a target of 20 per cent renewable energy consumption by the year 2020. Meeting this target will require massive changes in the production, transmission, and consumption of energy in the European community. Bjørn Bakken of SUSPLAN, a project initiated to develop strategies, recommendations and benchmarks for the integration of renewable energy resources, explains how they hope to aid the attainment of this goal and beyond.

As Europe is now committed to consuming 20 per cent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020, it is vital that there is a structured plan in place that delivers exactly what is needed, where it is needed – renewable energy is not a one size fits all solution by any means and this is something being addressed by the SUSPLAN project, which looks to match different renewable energy technologies to specific needs on a local level.

“We had been looking at local energy planning in Norway for nearly 10 years at SINTEF,” explains SUSPLAN’s Bjorn Bakken, “We were developing models in which you are able to compare several different technologies when planning local systems. We considered heating, cooling, gas supply and electricity together in the same model.

“Once we had gained some experience in these methods, we decided that it would be better to try and implement them on a broader scale. A team of us began working towards the SmartGrids technology platform on a European scale in preparation for the first FP7 calls to include regional planning for multiple energy sources.”

When the first round of FP7 calls finally came in 2007, however, their focus was very much on transnational systems. This meant that Bakken and his team were faced with having to adjust their original plans somewhat to fit the targets set out by the FP7. This may well have been a blessing in disguise however, as by the time they had finished they had created the highest rated proposal in their field with the SUSPLAN project, looking in the far future of the period 2030 until 2050.

Bakken explains in what ways they were required to modify their plans: “We still very much had the multi-energy carrier aspect as a central part of our proposal, but the quantitative analytical methods that we were originally using had to be changed so that in fact we were using different models for regional and transnational levels.

“This unfortunately meant that a lot of extra data transfer was necessary to make sure that the results could be correlated and compared,” Bakken continues, “but I think that now that we are finally getting round to publishing the final reports we have realised that it was worth all the effort!”

The main aim of the reports that have been produced is to provide decision makers with recommendations about the best ways to achieve higher levels of integration of renewable energy within their systems. Thus, they deliberately do not contain any information on nuclear or other non-renewable energy solutions as they are outside the scope of the project, although they do not discount them from being used in the future.

Within this framework, Bakken and his colleagues have conducted regional and transnational studies and are now carrying out studies on decision-support and barriers (i.e. what barriers there are to implementing the recommendations and how they can be overcome.) They have designed four differing storylines for the future, with each one predicting different outcomes on the amount of renewable energy integration achieved in the EU. These range from barely satisfying the 2020 target of 20 per cent, all the way up to 73 per cent of electricity provided from renewable sources in 2050.

While a lot of the results have confirmed what has already been presumed or predicted – such as the need for more infrastructure for electricity and less for gas in the forthcoming years – some of them may be less obvious. Bakken explains some of these new findings: “Cross-border challenges are probably the most important barriers to resolve. Renewable sources have to be harvested where they are available, in many cases far from load centres and cities. E.g. in coastal areas such as the Outer Hebrides off the north coast of Scotland, the huge capacity for wind and wave energy can not be utilised unless we have some sort of unified European organisation to fund it; we cannot and do not expect a single country to pay for everything.

“We must also be very careful in designing mechanisms that provide compensation for energy transit between importing and exporting countries; we do not want a situation in which this provides a barrier to the development of renewable energy. Furthermore, possible conflicts between energy infrastructure expansion and environmental interests have to be solved.”

A recent issue that the SUSPLAN project can provide numerical data for is the German government’s recent decision to begin shutting down their nuclear power facilities, since this is already part of their storylines. This is a tangible and achievable strategy under the designed frameworks, but will require large inestments in electricity infrastructures.

In terms of the target audience of the project results, Bakken hopes that they will be used by a number of different actors: “The first recipients will be the commissioners in Brussels. We have had several meetings with the working groups on the infrastructure package and they are very interested to hear about our analyses and recommendations so that they can include some scientific input into their policy-related work.

“We also have a number of stakeholders in the project, such as Red Eletrica in Spain, EnBW, Amprion and 50Hertz Transmission from Germany and Terna in Italy, who are very interested in the final results,” he continues. “Up until this spring we have mostly been disseminating preliminary results which are more aimed at academic audiences interested in our methodologies.”

The final reports and results are currently being reviewed and published on the SUSPLAN website, where all of the project material will be available for free. There are also plans for the near future to publish an interactive web interface in which users will be able to look at how the renewable energy systems of different countries could potentially evolve up until the year 2050.

Also available on the website is the preliminary agenda for the forthcoming concluding conference of SUSPLAN in Brussels, which will take place on the 7th October and will involve the presentation of the results and recommendations of the project.

For any decision makers and stakeholders involved in renewable energy planning, this will certainly be a worthwhile event to attend, as the findings of this project may well help to shape the way in which renewable energy is integrated in the EU for the next 40 years.

Click here to access the project website.

Published: Wednesday, 25th January 2012