HVDC/Supergrid is clearly important in providing energy flexibility in Europe and I think there is a European political advantage in such energy interconnection. It will 'bind' European nations together in other ways too.

But at the same time, the real gains in energy efficiency will come from national Smart Grids, which will have a major impact on domestic energy use. I recall a chart you posted many months ago showing that domestic demand was by far the largest component of total electricity use. Yet domestic demand is the worst informed and the least 'regulated' (except by price).

As Migu pointed out to me - if 2 million families in Sweden in Finland simultaneously switch on their Plasma TVs to watch an ice-hockey game, it takes the entire output of one nuclear reactor.

There should be greater regulation of new house and apartment building, to control the energy efficiency of the house. As it is today, a developer has no regulated responsibility for the future energy costs of the houses they sell, and certainly no responsibility to inform buyers so that they can compare life cycle costs (if the concept of LCC is understood at all, domestically).

2 way communication between energy vendor systems and users is the essence of Smart Grids (as it is with Super Grids).

We have to forget the 'always-on, use as much as you can afford' attitude to electricity.

You can't be me, I'm taken

How do these costs scale with capacity and distance? Is it true that a 2 GW cable over the same distance would be twice as expensive and a 1G GW cable over twice the distance would be twice as expensive? Or are there economies or diseconomies of scale here?

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

TenneT May Partner With Investors to Finance Offshore Wind Power Cables

TenneT Holding BV, the Dutch power grid operator that bought German electricity lines from E.ON AG last year, may seek investors to partner with on cables to connect offshore wind farms to mainland Germany.

"If this massive speed of investment continues, then there's no reason why we shouldn't be looking for a co-ownership of certain projects," Mel Kroon, the company's chief executive officer, said today in an interview in Berlin. TenneT is "in discussions with several parties to discover if the rate return on risk is adequate to have a tap to the financial markets, both for capital and for debt."

Germany plans to install offshore wind parks with capacity equivalent to the country's 17 nuclear reactors in the next two decades to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

 (...)

Dutch state-owned TenneT will invest about 5 billion euros ($6.7 billion) in Germany in the 10 years through 2020 and 4 billion euros in the Netherlands. "The main drain of money is only happening in the last two years because then you're actually building and buying stuff," he said.

Wind power

Offshore power lines are much easier to permit...

Why?

The need for new on-shore grid construction is now a top issue in the post-nuclear-closures debate in Germany, with strange alignments. While representatives of the governing parties seem to think that Greens can be split over the issue, some Greens made the argument that what's needed for wind is not really highest-capacity high-voltage cables but more medium-capacity cables, which can be laid underground. I'm not sure that that's enough (we will need balancing on an Europe-wide scale, and high-capacity cables are more efficient), but there was Green capaigning for such grid development long before Fukushima.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Jerome wrote in the diary:

The hype, mainly, is about a grid that would connect offshore wind farms to one another in the North Sea in a sort of "offshore superhighway" - that makes no sense.

Does it make sense to have subsea interconnectors running via an offshore wind farm? Take the Round 3 Dogger Bank proposal, as an extreme case, where the proposal is to build 9GWp of wind.

Would it make sense to run a Norway-Britain connector through that, to allow some of its energy to be exported easily to Scandinavia? It's practically on the way anyway, so maybe not much extra cable cost. Is the tricky bit here the building of a multi-nodal HVDC network, or the economics, or something else?