Smart Grid Research in Europe

Smart grid research in Europe is proceeding apace according to Dr. Nouredine Hadjsaid, one of the continent's top experts on the smart grid.

Dr. Hadjsaid, director of the IDEA research collaborative in Grenoble, France, which includes Schneider Electric, EDF (the French national electricity company and Europe's largest utility), and the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, was in Denver last week speaking to various U.S. smart grid experts. One of his stops was at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is about 10 miles west of Denver. (In the spring 2010 semester, experts from NREL, led by Robert Noun, director of public affairs, will teach a course in the graduate program; one of the likely topics is the smart grid.)

Sponsors of Dr. Hadjsaid's visit to Colorado included the Colorado Rhone-Alpes Economic Development Partnership, Colorado Cleantech Industry Association, and the World Trade Center Denver, and the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade. In the past several years, it has become common for international visitors to travel to Colorado to observe what is going on here in the cleantech field and vice versa. Such interactions clearly confirm Colorado's central role in the U.S. new energy economy.

According to Dr. Hadjsaid, the French grid was not designed to integrate distributed integration (from sources such as renewable energy). Rather, it was designed to move electricity from a relatively small number of huge power stations and deliver it to end users. However, to completely redesign the grid would be very costly, he said. Thus, the improvements that are needed to make the system more efficient should be made at the distribution level, i.e., the electricity lines that go into customers' homes and businesses.

The electricity distribution paradigm in France -- and Europe more broadly -- must be changed to take into account three factors, he said:

• More renewable energy than ever before must be integrated into the grid (in France, for instance, the amount of renewable energy has grown rapidly from 3.5 MW in 1996 to 2,454 MW in 2007)
• Infrastructure is aging and becoming more susceptible to failure
• The rate of grid failure and outages is growing

He noted that Germany now has 24,000 MW of renewables on its grid while Spain has 16,000 MW.

He spoke about several issues that need immediate attention in terms of the smart grid:

• The fact that renewable energy is "intermittent" must be managed
• Transmission line loses of seven percent are normal in Europe; in the U.S. the figure is between eight and 10 percent
• The enhanced grid must be "self healing," or put another way it must predict potential problems and remedy them before the cascading impacts of blackouts result (in France, major power losses amounted to 65 minutes in 2008; the resulting economic loss was about $1 billion per minute; in the U.S. major power losses amounted to 200 minutes in 2008)

He pointed out these comparisons between the European Union and the United States:

U.S.

• Low load density
• Running near line limits
• Little redundancy
• Weak automation
• Absence of federal policy to aggressively promote renewables

EU

• Medium to high load density
• Reasonable redundancy
• Distribution is more automated
• Networks are not critically loaded
• Existence of strong EU policy to aggressively promote renewables

"There is a strong commitment to de-carbonize European society," Dr. Hadjsaid said. "Everyone in Europe is in favor of green development."

While Dr. Hadjsaid avoided saying the following, I think the major difference between how Europe is proceeding in comparison to the U.S. is this: In Europe there is a strong political will -- irrespective of whether a political party is left, center or right in outlook-- to address climate change. By contrast, the U.S. largely lacks this strong political will. Despite the best efforts of the Obama Administration and some members of Congress, I predict a monumental uphill battle before Congress really takes this subject seriously. And that is a shame from environmental, energy-security, and economic perspectives.