Is a Northern Global Grid Link feasible?

The Arctic Circle is just over 10,000 miles long. A supergrid running its full length would allow solar PV and other forms of low carbon electricity to be transmitted from daylight areas to evening areas.

It would be shorter than the 12,000 miles of the UK high voltage grid.

National grids in Canada, Scandinavia and Russia could be connected, with substantial potential for generation capacity reduction. 

The growing geothermal output of Iceland could then also be fed into it. An Iceland/UK link is already being planned.

With global warming, northerly latitudes will become increasingly attractive places to live, so this is a useful piece of infrastructure for the world's future.

Or do you think such grand projects are extravagant and environmentally dubious?

 If so, your best bet is to follow my advice and timeshift your electricity consumption out of the peak and into the trough!

Happy timeshifting!

Demand Response - you ain't seen nothin' yet!

In order to accommodate more than token (10-15% of peak demand) amounts of renewable electricity on the grid in  UK, we will need to adjust our demand to meet available generation on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

This will mean:

·         Switching almost everything that is not essential off after dark if the wind is not blowing

·         Because the wind sometimes does not blow hard for weeks at a time in mid-winter, any storage will need to be capable of providing power for much more than a day or two.

There is a way of reducing this – a global renewable grid so that those parts of the world which have very high demand on winter evenings are supplied from places where the sun is still shining – e.g. Western Europe from Texas. (At the peak UK demand time, it’s around midday in Texas).

A first step to this is the Iceland – Scotland undersea link, initially to provide geothermal electricity to Europe.

The less we like the idea of these mega-projects and their financial and environmental costs, the more we will need to think about –and implement- demand management.

The time to start is now.  It will take many years or decades from early adopters like you and I doing something about it to mainstream action having a decisive effect.

http://theintelligentplug.com 

Iceland

  

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