4 ms·

"Spain has itself prohibited new solar projects because of a lack of interconnectors to transmit the energy to France" - I'd like to know more about this.

by wayanon 11y ago

adaml_623 11y ago
That's a really crazy thing to read. Also "The EU has set a target of ensuring that 10% of each member country’s power can be transported abroad by cable by 2020." Is that all? The governments of this world all seem to suffer from such blinkered short term visions. They can spend billions on a sporting event but a robust Europe wide electricity grid sourcing power from a sunny south...
- PietdeVries 11y ago
  I think it's not that straight forward... Photo-voltaic cells produce electricity, but not at a constant rate. At night zero, in the morning a bit, at noon a lot, etc. So unless you want to keep a regular power generator as backup, you need to hook yourself to a larger grid. If France doesn't want cables from Spain, I can imagine Spain won't put a lot of effort in new projects. Now the hard part about solar energy powering the world is not the technical part. It's politics. Morocco is relatively stable, but most countries around the equator are not (unfortunately). And I can imagine that if the western economies (where the money is) would need to fund the projects in the southern countries (where the sun is), they'd want some guarantees. You remember the political mayhem of a few years back that jumped from country to country, tumbling over dictators, upsetting tourism and to this date killing people in Syria?
  - adaml_623 11y ago
    This article is about CSP which can provide power during the night. So your point about PV is valid but hopefully will be less relevant in the future. And really when I said south I was hoping that they could just put more solar systems in Spain for feeding power up to the UK. The African connection is good but as you say politically a problem. In short the EU should be doing better within it's own borders
    - toyg 11y ago
      > In short the EU should be doing better within it's own borders I agree. It's not terribly surprising that some countries are nitpicking though: the solar industry is young, small and relatively poor. The nuclear industry is established, big and relatively rich. These industries are direct competitors in a heavily regulated environment, the sort of market where entrenched players are at natural advantage.
- luch 11y ago
  There is the issue of cascading failures also here : several of my friends working for majors European power grid suppliers still have nightmares from the 2006 power outage. A vessel ship cut a power line in Germany, which triggered a domino-like power outage throughout all Europe (up to Portugal IIRC) making 15 millions of home go dark for several hours. Solar (and worse, Wind) power is not constant : it adds a source of unstability in the mix.
  - biehl 11y ago
    it adds a source of unstability in the mix Because thermal plants never trip??
    - msandford 11y ago
      They'll trip very infrequently, sure, but they're not forcing constant re-balancing minute by minute or hour by hour.
      - biehl 11y ago
        Since the risk is there you need backup capacity anyway, and even if thermal production is very stable, usage over the day is not. So you need balancing no matter what. You do need to improve balancing to integrate lots of wind/solar - however with land-wind being so cheap, there is money to spend on balancing.
        msandford 11y ago
        Land is cheap, sure, but the transmission capacity to take it from generation to consumption sure isn't. Europe had electrical grids that were perfectly capable of distributing the "ancient, horrible" thermal generation quite acceptably. Now there's a lot of renewables installed the grid is starting to look like the bottleneck. Who pays for the grid upgrades so that it's not the bottleneck? The renewable people say the grid people should, and the grid people say that the renewable people should. If there was so, so much money in the renewables market then why are they balking at paying for installing more long haul transmission lines? Probably because they're very expensive; if they were just 1% of the cost of the renewable facility nobody would really care. But they're probably on par with or perhaps even more expensive than the total plant installation. Which takes these projects from profitable versus thermal to non-profitable versus thermal I'd suspect. Hence the bickering. So thermal balancing is a well understood art that's going on 100 years old now. Renewable balancing is not as well understood and is perhaps only 5-10 years old at any kind of scale. That's why grid batteries are such a big deal, because balancing is hard and batteries tend to have little/no latency so they can react faster than natural gas peaker plants. I'm not saying that moving to renewables is a bad idea and that we should just stick with coal or anything; renewables are obviously the future. But there are definite, real problems associated with their roll-out that aren't easily or cheaply solved. I think one thing that will make a huge difference is exposing the time-variable pricing of electricity to everyone. It'll create a huge market for demand smoothing and consumer grade (and scale!) load smoothing devices like inverter A/C units, peak shaving batteries (1kWh battery with a 3kW inverter/charger), people putting 500-1000W of solar on their own roofs, etc.
- pjc50 11y ago
  They've set a target but not allocated any money, in the middle of an economic crisis and strong opposition to budget deficit spending. That means it's probably not going to happen.
- tormeh 11y ago
  Remember that politics in wealthy countries is all about doing approximately what people want you to do. The payoff is that you get some leeway on issues people don't care about (which is where members of congress earn their money). It's the same with the EU. The EU is not magical; everything agreed on is a compromise between member states, many of which have radically different priorities.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  Perhaps they need to play more Power Grid [0], entire EU expansion? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Grid
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
Looking at it charitably, you can make more money from renewable projects, if you have a bigger grid, as you can ship the excess energy on particularly sunny or windy days to neighbouring areas. So if the interconnects are non-existant or already used to full capacity, it makes the projects slightly less economically viable. But since the spanish government recently launched a bit of a full-on attack on solar power, it's more likely to be BS, to pander to vested interests that the power will compete with.
bibinou 11y ago
Looks like there is a HVDC link being built : http://www.siemens.com/press/en/events/2015/energymanagement/2015-04-Inelfe.php?content%5B%5D=EM http://www.siemens.com/press/en/events/2015/energymanagement... Nice graphs on pages 13 & 14 of this presentation: http://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2015/energymanagement/2015-04-inelfe/presentation-rte-ree-en.pdf http://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2015/energymanag... > France-Spain power exchanges: balance France -> Spain of 3.6TWh
aldel 11y ago
Very inaccurate statement with some elements of truth, I'd say. (But then I'm not an expert, just an interested reader on the topic). On the first point, Spain has not prohibited new solar projects. It has removed (even retroactively) most incentives to renewable energy production. This is in part because of the speculative bubble in solar investment caused by the previously existing incentives (production goals were overshot by a huge margin), but also, as others have pointed out, to pander to corporate interests (this is very clear in the way self-consumption is being penalized under new legislation) As for interconnections with France, they have recently doubled their capacity from 1% to 2%. So the EU's 10% interconnection goal for all countries is still very far away for the France-Spain connection. I'm not sure about the reasons for this. There is on the one hand the very high cost of building connections across the Pyrenees (even higher now that they have to be underground due to environmental concerns); a traditional reluctance by France is also often cited, but OTOH I think France is much better connected to other neighboring countries, so I'm not sure what to make of this. It's the "because" in the sentence that is completely wrong. It's Spain official policy to increase the interconnection capacity with France, due to the huge energy production overcapacity (over 200%) of the country. But it is mostly combined cycle and gas plants that concentrate most of the excess capacity and are way underused. See e.g. http://on.ft.com/1rt0XNG http://on.ft.com/1rt0XNG for more info. It's the use of all the gas infrastructure (including regasification plants, etc.) that Spain wants to "push" into Europe's market. The situation in Ucraine may well help with this, because of Europe's dependency on Russia.

"Spain has itself prohibited new solar projects because of a lack of interconnectors to transmit the energy to France" - I'd like to know more about this.

by wayanon 11y ago

"Spain has itself prohibited new solar projects because of a lack of interconnectors to transmit the energy to France" - I'd like to know more about this.

adaml_623 11y ago

That's a really crazy thing to read. Also "The EU has set a target of ensuring that 10% of each member country’s power can be transported abroad by cable by 2020." Is that all? The governments of this world all seem to suffer from such blinkered short term visions. They can spend billions on a sporting event but a robust Europe wide electricity grid sourcing power from a sunny south...

PietdeVries 11y ago
I think it's not that straight forward... Photo-voltaic cells produce electricity, but not at a constant rate. At night zero, in the morning a bit, at noon a lot, etc. So unless you want to keep a regular power generator as backup, you need to hook yourself to a larger grid. If France doesn't want cables from Spain, I can imagine Spain won't put a lot of effort in new projects. Now the hard part about solar energy powering the world is not the technical part. It's politics. Morocco is relatively stable, but most countries around the equator are not (unfortunately). And I can imagine that if the western economies (where the money is) would need to fund the projects in the southern countries (where the sun is), they'd want some guarantees. You remember the political mayhem of a few years back that jumped from country to country, tumbling over dictators, upsetting tourism and to this date killing people in Syria?
- adaml_623 11y ago
  This article is about CSP which can provide power during the night. So your point about PV is valid but hopefully will be less relevant in the future. And really when I said south I was hoping that they could just put more solar systems in Spain for feeding power up to the UK. The African connection is good but as you say politically a problem. In short the EU should be doing better within it's own borders
  - toyg 11y ago
    > In short the EU should be doing better within it's own borders I agree. It's not terribly surprising that some countries are nitpicking though: the solar industry is young, small and relatively poor. The nuclear industry is established, big and relatively rich. These industries are direct competitors in a heavily regulated environment, the sort of market where entrenched players are at natural advantage.
luch 11y ago
There is the issue of cascading failures also here : several of my friends working for majors European power grid suppliers still have nightmares from the 2006 power outage. A vessel ship cut a power line in Germany, which triggered a domino-like power outage throughout all Europe (up to Portugal IIRC) making 15 millions of home go dark for several hours. Solar (and worse, Wind) power is not constant : it adds a source of unstability in the mix.
- biehl 11y ago
  it adds a source of unstability in the mix Because thermal plants never trip??
  - msandford 11y ago
    They'll trip very infrequently, sure, but they're not forcing constant re-balancing minute by minute or hour by hour.
    - biehl 11y ago
      Since the risk is there you need backup capacity anyway, and even if thermal production is very stable, usage over the day is not. So you need balancing no matter what. You do need to improve balancing to integrate lots of wind/solar - however with land-wind being so cheap, there is money to spend on balancing.
      - msandford 11y ago
        Land is cheap, sure, but the transmission capacity to take it from generation to consumption sure isn't. Europe had electrical grids that were perfectly capable of distributing the "ancient, horrible" thermal generation quite acceptably. Now there's a lot of renewables installed the grid is starting to look like the bottleneck. Who pays for the grid upgrades so that it's not the bottleneck? The renewable people say the grid people should, and the grid people say that the renewable people should. If there was so, so much money in the renewables market then why are they balking at paying for installing more long haul transmission lines? Probably because they're very expensive; if they were just 1% of the cost of the renewable facility nobody would really care. But they're probably on par with or perhaps even more expensive than the total plant installation. Which takes these projects from profitable versus thermal to non-profitable versus thermal I'd suspect. Hence the bickering. So thermal balancing is a well understood art that's going on 100 years old now. Renewable balancing is not as well understood and is perhaps only 5-10 years old at any kind of scale. That's why grid batteries are such a big deal, because balancing is hard and batteries tend to have little/no latency so they can react faster than natural gas peaker plants. I'm not saying that moving to renewables is a bad idea and that we should just stick with coal or anything; renewables are obviously the future. But there are definite, real problems associated with their roll-out that aren't easily or cheaply solved. I think one thing that will make a huge difference is exposing the time-variable pricing of electricity to everyone. It'll create a huge market for demand smoothing and consumer grade (and scale!) load smoothing devices like inverter A/C units, peak shaving batteries (1kWh battery with a 3kW inverter/charger), people putting 500-1000W of solar on their own roofs, etc.
pjc50 11y ago
They've set a target but not allocated any money, in the middle of an economic crisis and strong opposition to budget deficit spending. That means it's probably not going to happen.
tormeh 11y ago
Remember that politics in wealthy countries is all about doing approximately what people want you to do. The payoff is that you get some leeway on issues people don't care about (which is where members of congress earn their money). It's the same with the EU. The EU is not magical; everything agreed on is a compromise between member states, many of which have radically different priorities.
logfromblammo 11y ago
Perhaps they need to play more Power Grid [0], entire EU expansion? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Grid

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

Looking at it charitably, you can make more money from renewable projects, if you have a bigger grid, as you can ship the excess energy on particularly sunny or windy days to neighbouring areas. So if the interconnects are non-existant or already used to full capacity, it makes the projects slightly less economically viable. But since the spanish government recently launched a bit of a full-on attack on solar power, it's more likely to be BS, to pander to vested interests that the power will compete with.

bibinou 11y ago

Looks like there is a HVDC link being built : http://www.siemens.com/press/en/events/2015/energymanagement/2015-04-Inelfe.php?content%5B%5D=EM http://www.siemens.com/press/en/events/2015/energymanagement... Nice graphs on pages 13 & 14 of this presentation: http://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2015/energymanagement/2015-04-inelfe/presentation-rte-ree-en.pdf http://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2015/energymanag... > France-Spain power exchanges: balance France -> Spain of 3.6TWh

aldel 11y ago

Very inaccurate statement with some elements of truth, I'd say. (But then I'm not an expert, just an interested reader on the topic). On the first point, Spain has not prohibited new solar projects. It has removed (even retroactively) most incentives to renewable energy production. This is in part because of the speculative bubble in solar investment caused by the previously existing incentives (production goals were overshot by a huge margin), but also, as others have pointed out, to pander to corporate interests (this is very clear in the way self-consumption is being penalized under new legislation) As for interconnections with France, they have recently doubled their capacity from 1% to 2%. So the EU's 10% interconnection goal for all countries is still very far away for the France-Spain connection. I'm not sure about the reasons for this. There is on the one hand the very high cost of building connections across the Pyrenees (even higher now that they have to be underground due to environmental concerns); a traditional reluctance by France is also often cited, but OTOH I think France is much better connected to other neighboring countries, so I'm not sure what to make of this. It's the "because" in the sentence that is completely wrong. It's Spain official policy to increase the interconnection capacity with France, due to the huge energy production overcapacity (over 200%) of the country. But it is mostly combined cycle and gas plants that concentrate most of the excess capacity and are way underused. See e.g. http://on.ft.com/1rt0XNG http://on.ft.com/1rt0XNG for more info. It's the use of all the gas infrastructure (including regasification plants, etc.) that Spain wants to "push" into Europe's market. The situation in Ucraine may well help with this, because of Europe's dependency on Russia.