Innovative Grid Boosting Technologies Needed to Bring Europe’s Decarbonisation Targets Within Reach, Says New Industry Report
June 20 2024 - 3:00AM
Business Wire
CurrENT Europe, the industry association for European innovative
grid technology companies, and economic consulting firm Compass
Lexecon are releasing a new innovative grid technologies
report.
Grids are increasingly becoming a bottleneck. Up until now, the
transition has been focused on the production side of clean energy
generation, but we are now hitting the limits of our grid. The
energy transition urgently needs more grid capacity. Electrical
transmission and distribution network lengths across Europe need to
grow by up to 50% and 60% respectively if we are to see a fully
decarbonized power system by 2040.
Innovative Grid Technologies (IGTs) can improve grid capacity up
to 40%, generating between 100-200GW of extra capacity by 2040.
Even a conservative deployment of innovative grid technologies can
accelerate transmission grids expansion by 5 to 8 years and
distribution grids expansion by 4 to 7 years. Installing IGTs could
contribute to the need for network buildout and achieve gross
savings of approximately 35% representing up to 700 billion Euros
by 2040.
CurrENT and Compass Lexecon’s report, supported by Breakthrough
Energy, share 5 recommendations to improve IGT adoption and ‘future
proof’ European grids:
- Avoid ‘death by pilot’ – Issue guidance to national grid
regulators on how to incentivize meaningful mass deployment of
commercially available grid-enhancing technologies.
- Measure and set specific targets for adding grid
capacity - Europe needs to measure how fast grid capacity is
growing annually, and if the pace willl meet Europe’s
decarbonisation and energy independence objectives.
- A greater proportion of innovation funding needs to go to
electricity grids - Only 18% of the total funding of €3.1
billion spent under the EU ETS Innovation Fund has gone to
renewables and storage and 8% to other technologies including
efficiency.
- Regulatory and technical sandboxes - These will ensure
that safe, reliable technology can be proven as proposed by the
Commission’s Net Zero Industry Act.
- Guarantee scheme(s) for the perceived risk of performance of
innovative technologies - Some utilities are concerned about
potential underperformance of mature innovative technologies or
even stranding of assets. Such guarantees could mitigate these
concerns in implementing newer grid technologies by
stakeholders.
Read the full report here.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240619711173/en/
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