‘How far does the power need to go?
GB transmission network development to accommodate renewables’.
The Government’s ‘clean power’ action plan towards 2030 has made clear the amount of development of renewable generation capacity that has to be done very quickly, but is it so clear just how much transmission network expansion is needed, not just in the next 5 years but the next 15?
This session presents a straightforward way of assessing that need and showing the scale of the network development challenge. It uses a simple model of the GB transmission system developed at University of Strathclyde in a project with The Energy Landscape and the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult. With hour-by-hour, spatially correlated variations in demand and the power available from wind and solar, the modelling shows how much power would flow how far in each time period, expressed via MWkm figures. Peak flows across a ‘copper plate’, unconstrained network would increase from 9 million MWkm in 2022 to25 million MWkm in 2035. In reality, network capacity is finite. To build enough network capacity to accommodate flows at the increasingly long upper tail of the hour-by-hour MWkm distribution would be uneconomic.
The modelling shows how much renewable energy would need to be curtailed not just because of network limits but simply because, in a growing number of hours in a year, the power available from variable or inflexible low carbon power sources exceeds demand. The potential importance of interconnectors to ‘absorb’ surpluses of power Britain and help to meet deficits is shown. The work also explores the potential impact of battery storage and electrolyser demand and shows that it may be economic to expand the transmission network even further from what has already been planned by the National Energy System Operator (NESO). Finally, it is posited that the methods used could be useful in multi-vector, whole energy system strategic spatial planning.
Presenters: Keith Bell & Simon Gill
Keith Bell
Keith holds the Scottish Power Chair in Future Power Systems at the University of Strathclyde where he has been since 2005. He gained his PhD at the University of Bath in 1995 and then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester and in Naples and as a system development engineer with National Grid.
Keith is a co-Director of the UK Energy Research Centre and, in April 2019, became a member of the UK’s Climate Change Committee. A Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has advised the Scottish, UK and Irish governments and Ofgem on electrical energy and power systems issues and is an invited expert member of CIGRE Study Committee C1 on System Development and Economics. He is also on the Executive Committees of the IET Power Academy, an initiative to encourage graduate engineers into the power and energy sector, and the Power Systems Computation Conference. He was on the Electricity Networks Commissioner’s advisory group and is a member of Ofgem’s climate resilience expert panel.
Simon Gill
Simon is a freelance energy system specialist with 15 years’ experience in the energy sector. He is a physicist through his first degree, and an electrical engineer through his PhD. He is also an associate of Regen, a centre of energy system expertise, and a Policy Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Over the past three years, his main area of focus has been on electricity markets and system operation in Britain. He has contributed several papers to inform the debate about market reform and the UK Government’s Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA). He has also led projects on hydrogen, cross border interconnectors, decarbonisation of the gas grid, and energy innovation. Prior to that, Simon spent five years with The Scottish Government providing detailed analysis and advice on a range of challenges across the energy system. He worked closely with Scottish Ministers to support delivery of Scotland’s stretching greenhouse gas emissions targets and he develop strong collaborations with the private sector.
Simon’s grounding in the energy sector came from his time in the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Strathclyde, where he worked extensively on electricity network innovation projects.
