2005-05-17 - Trevor Gregory
ABB UK Managing Director talks about how ABB's proven technology helps to prevent widespread power outages
In the last ten years electricity consumption in Europe has grown by some 15 percent, with cross border exchange of power accounting for around five percent of the total consumption. At the same time transmission capacity has increased by only three to five percent.
Electric power cannot be stored and the grid must ensure that production and consumption are balanced at all times. A task that is increasingly difficult in a liberalised market.
With large investments in renewable energy planned from production resources increasingly located remotely from the load centres and no let up in the demand for electricity, bigger and smarter grids are essential.
What is needed to make this happen and what are the technological implications?
Grid investment needs to be stimulated by incentives and/or through reliability standards that can be enforced with penalties.
Coordination of the operation of grids in individual countries must be improved and, of course, the tools made available to make this possible.
Grids themselves must become more robust to disturbances in the electric system. This can best be done by improving the controllability of the grid, limiting the extension of synchronised grids and setting up ‘firewalls’ with DC links that allow exchange of power but prevent faults from spreading.
Environmental restrictions will require that new overhead lines be minimised or even eliminated - undergrounding will be increasingly preferred or even demanded.
The performance and reliability of transmission grids can be enhanced quickly with proven technologies to increase capacity, with significantly lower environmental impact compared with conventional methods of upgrading the grid.
Such technologies include: HVDC transmission, HVDC Light, FACTS devices, gas insulated substations, life extension to increase the reliability and useful life of existing equipment, and wide area monitoring and control.
These technologies provide insight into grid performance, increase grid capacity and provide tools to mitigate or prevent widespread power outages.