An unprecedented investment is needed to refit fossil-era grids for renewables and surging electrification. Analysts warn the cost will fall on consumers.
Europe’s ambition to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 hinges on ramping up solar and wind power, potentially tripling the amount of electricity crackling through the power grid.
Its grid, however, is a network built for steady, centralized coal-fired power. Turning this into one capable of managing vast, intermittent flows is the biggest engineering challenge since its inception.
And the potential costs of that infrastructure upgrade, without including the price tag of the solar arrays and wind farms, are increasingly being laid bare.
Recent estimates put total costs for upgrading transmission lines across continental Europe at between 2 trillion euros and 3 trillion euros ($2.2 trillion–$3.3 trillion) by mid-century.
In the United Kingdom alone, National Grid ESO projected in 2020 that achieving net-zero will require roughly 3 trillion pounds ($4 trillion) of investment over the next three decades.
Samuel Furfari, who served as a senior official at the European Union’s Energy Directorate-General from 1982 to 2018, told The Epoch Times, “The problem is that if you multiply renewable energy, you need to multiply the interconnections [between countries].”
He said that decentralized renewables demand new interconnections among hundreds of thousands of sites, each requiring costly copper cables and substations, driving the overall price tag ever higher.
“That means that you need to build new lines to interconnect all those decentralized plans, and they need to be linked … with cables, with copper cables, and this is very expensive, so it’s why they say that the price will explode.”
With binding net-zero laws in place across the EU’s 27 member states and the UK, the rapid rollout of renewables means that networks originally designed for fossil-fuel power flows need to be upgraded to cater for electricity generated by renewables.
Electricity from the power grid currently meets about 18 percent of UK energy demand (23 percent in the EU), but by 2050, it is forecast to account for roughly 60 percent of the power supply.
In the near term, total power demand to the grid may rise by up to 40 percent between 2023 and 2035.
Last month, the European Court of Auditors, authors of the 2 trillion euro to 3 trillion euro valuation, said that this sum must be spent on the grids so they can be expanded, upgraded, and digitalized to ensure “both reliable integration of renewables and security of supply. “
By Owen Evans
