Why can’t we just change to Green Energy?
If renewable energy is the future, why are we still stuck in the past?
All of us must have heard that fossil fuels are now depleting and we have been facing an energy crisis. Going with experts’ advice, switching to Green Energy is the way left to sustain our lifestyle. But do you know that it’s not as easy as they say? Here we will explain why:
In the country of Iceland, nearly 100% of its energy consumption comes from renewable sources mainly hydropower (72%) and geothermal energy (28%). Germany is a world leader in Solar Energy such that it has fulfilled its goal of getting nearly 65% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020. Now, Countries with high shares of renewable energy in total final energy consumption are amongst those with limited or no fossil fuel reserves. These include countries like Tajikistan (58%, hydropower), Montenegro (46%, traditional biomass, and hydropower), Albania (38%, mostly hydropower with traditional biomass use). With Germany as inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank even poured billions into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya. Last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get the coal underneath it. But after some keen observation one can say Germany did not just fall short on its commitments, its emissions are nearly flatlined since 2009.
Now solar and wind advocates say that cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons to believe the opposite will be the case. Currently, the countries like Germany are falling short of expectations, and to understand why, one needs to know what the power grid has got to do with this problem.
Germany’s electrical grid is part of the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe. Germany’s installed capacity for electric generation increased from 121 gigawatts (GW) in 2000 to 218 GW in 2019, an 80% increase, while electricity generation increased only 5% in the same period. Although Germany is generating record amounts of clean energy in the north, its grid is too weak to transport all the power down to load centers in the south — a longstanding challenge for the country that is only getting worse. To understand why one needs to know:
What’s a Power Grid?
The power grid is a network of electrical transmission lines connecting a multiplicity of generating stations to loads over a wide area. Here, TenneT the transmission system operator that serves the Netherlands and part of Germany, brought a record 20.2 terawatt-hours of energy onshore in 2019, or enough to power more than 6 million households. But because of a lack of adequate grid infrastructure, not all of it ends up going to German customers.
Green Future
Now you might have understood what the issue is here, it’s not just the building of Power Plants but to Build high transmission lines so that the produced electricity can reach our houses through several sub-stations. If we plan on having a Green Energy Future, then these transmission lines need to work. There are also some advantages to switching to Green Energy, which lowers the greenhouse gasses emissions, which in turn benefits us, but lowering emissions means switching to Electric Cars from Gas Cars, Cooking on Electric Stoves, basically seeing we are going to be using a lot more electricity than initially planned, anywhere from 50% to twice than we currently use.
Then what’s currently stopping us?
In a decarbonized future we are going to need all the electricity we can get from these countries that can produce this energy everywhere around the globe, as we are going to move a lot of energy, the current transmission is just not viable. Here is where high Voltage transmission lines come in, the infrastructure in play does not get a lot of attention, but it is the key. Building this infrastructure is a lot more complex than just building a power plant everywhere possible. This Power is transmitted in a wire. In a normal wire, the metal is enclosed in a plastic casing, because if two metal wires come in contact a short circuit may occur, but in the case of a high transmission wire, it’s just bare metal with no casing, in this case, air acts an insulator and with sufficient distance among them i.e., if they are kept far enough apart from each other it’s safe. But this also means they need to be kept far away from everything, trees as well.
And as we lengthen the distance from source to need, those are needed more and with such consumption, we also will be needing to make current ones bigger. This means the bigger the cable the more power is transmitted, but also decreases the resistance that means, as the area of cross-section of a cable increases the resistance decreases. And as they are bigger, they have to be far apart for insulation and this means they also need to be built taller, this makes them harder to build since to transmit power from one state to another it will be needing to cross Private land, and very often the developer can get the 99% of landowners to agree, but there will be this 1% that will not agree and that can often stop the whole projects. Some experts say we need to start building now if we want to be ready with green energy. As estimated, a power plant typically takes a year to complete while a transmission grid takes typically 5–10 years to complete and even will be stopped.
It is expected that by 2050, 62 % of generated energy will be covered by renewables. In comparison, the amount of green energy generated in 2019 represented 27 % of the worldwide production and only 13 % of the entire production capacity is in Slovakia. However, connecting renewable energy sources (RES) with the grid is not as simple as it may seem and their effectiveness is entirely dependent on weather conditions. From this point of view, RES is considered an unstable energy source, and their operation, without an advanced management system, can cause a serious grid imbalance.
What’s Next?
To have an efficient and steady power supply, countries will need a new, interconnected, high-voltage grid. This means it would take nearly the same budget as transitioning into Solar or Wind energy. But we found that just making greener electricity is not enough. We have to have the ability to move it in case of need. Transmission is as important as the part of the production. So, experts say to have a greener future, transmission lines need to be proactively built.
Electricity Accumulation: It is a type of energy storage system where Batteries or others that can store unused energy and use it for later needs. Artificial intelligence can now improve prediction systems and thus allow for more accurate energy consumption forecasts. This can always be a way, but people say that transmitting energy storage devices can also be an issue.
Energy Decentralization: this is a method in which energy production is shifted from a few big power plants to a system of small local energy sources that ensure energy is consumed as close as possible to its source, even on the level of individual residential buildings. One such implementation is prosumers.
Smart Grid: Online connection of various sources such as solar panels, batteries, EV chargers, or other equipment. Through such analysis of collected “Big data” in real-time, it is possible to speed up the reaction time to the changes in the power grid and thus ensure high quality and stable energy supply. Or in other words, devices can dispose of unused energy to benefit other equipment that is in need of it. Or better management of the power grid.
Micro-grids & Blockchain: Or, simply said, self-sufficient energy communities. This is taken from the example of the potential of distributed databases to eliminate cyber-attacks proved to be so efficient that even international financial institutions e.g. J.P. Morgan and Nasdaq consider its implementation. Similarly, as during energy generation decentralization in which the responsibility for the grid operation is not in the hands of a single supplier, distributed databases mean that an attack on one single point in the grid, e.g. one power plant, cannot interfere with the operation of the entire system
Global Policy: recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his UK counterpart Boris Johnson have unveiled an ambitious plan for the world’s first transnational network of interconnected solar power grids. It will be called Green Grids Initiative: One Sun One World One Grid.
If you want to dig a little deeper:
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