Nine European countries are setting an impressive example on the use of renewable energies with the North Seas Countries’ Offshore Grid Initiative. Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden and the UK intend to build a high-voltage grid beneath the North Sea to connect wind turbines – a trailblazing project that would create Europe’s first cross-border energy network. Despite the Copenhagen conference’s failure to reach a new global agreement on climate protection in December 2009, European countries are taking a further step towards a climate-friendly energy supply with this enormous eco-power grid.
“The initiative is of great importance for Germany, since we have ambitious plans to expand our offshore energy capabilities,” explains Rainer Brüderle, Germany’s Minister of Economics and Technology. He sees the project as a major step towards the age of renewable energies. At present, the cross-border green-electricity project is still at the planning stage. Germany and its European partner countries floated the ambitious idea with a Political Declaration at the end of 2009. Three main reasons for the initiative are given in the Declaration: it would strengthen security of supply, boost competition on the internal market and support the integration of renewable energies. After the Desertec desert-power project, this is the second major plan for pan-European investment in sustainable energy technologies within a short space of time. The power that would be generated by the Desertec project using solar power plants in North Africa would meet about one fifth of Europe’s entire energy requirements.
To ensure that electricity from wind farms can later be delivered to as many parts of Europe as possible, the North Seas Countries’ Offshore Grid Initiative is planning to bundle energy resources by interconnecting wind farms using thousands of kilometres of cable. The grid could also be connected with hydroelectric power plants in Scandinavia to improve eco-power storage, as well as with tidal power plants on the Belgian and Danish coasts and other wind and solar plants in continental Europe. Such a network would make the participating countries more independent of weather fluctuations, which have been a drawback of wind and solar energy up to now.
The founders of the North Seas Countries’ Offshore Grid Initiative want to initiate further planning steps in 2010, and also hope to bring in the grid operators. Experts estimate the potential cost of the high-tech grid at roughly 30 billion euros.
