Bloomberg has an article on exporting geothermal and hydro power from Iceland to Europe via a new undersea transmission cable - Iceland Channels Volcanoes to Win Europe's Energy-Supply Race.

Europeans left stranded at airports last year as an Icelandic volcano spewed ash across the continent may soon benefit from the power that seethes beneath the remote north Atlantic island.

Iceland is doing a feasibility study into building a 1,170- kilometer (727-mile) power cable to Scotland to send some of its untapped potential of 18 terawatt-hours of geothermal and hydropower -- that’s enough for 5 million European homes. The project has the backing of the government, Industry Minister Katrin Juliusdottir said in an interview.

“Icelanders live with earthquakes and volcanic activity but the benefits are that now we can monetize these powers,” said Valdimar Armann, an economist at Reykjavik-based asset manager GAMMA, who estimates annual clean-energy exports could reach about a tenth of the island’s $12 billion economy.

The island is trying to emerge from Europe’s biggest banking meltdown this century to restyle itself as one of the European Union’s main sources of renewable energy. The power cable, which would be the longest of its kind ever built, would come as the EU strives to reach its target of 20 percent clean energy by 2020. In about 20 years, Iceland’s energy revenue per capita may rival that of Norway, where oil income has made its $540 billion sovereign wealth fund the world’s second-biggest, Armann said.

The U.K. day-ahead spot price values 18 terawatt hours at 828 million pounds ($1.33 billion), according to data available on Bloomberg. Landsvirkjun, a state-owned utility that produces 75 percent of Iceland’s electricity, is driving the feasibility study for the $2.1 billion power-cable project, which would send as much as 5 terawatt-hours a year

Reuters has a report on interest in using Norwegian hydro power for energy storage as part of a north sea supergrid - Norway hydro can aid Europe move to renewables: IEA

The International Energy Agency said Norwegian hydropower could provide the reliable base Europe needs to invest in solar, wind and other renewable energy forms and urged Norway to expand cable links to other countries.

"Norway can help Europe introduce more volatile renewable energy sources into the market by providing a sustainable backup," said Nobuo Tanaka, the agency's executive director, in an interview on Friday at a renewable energy conference. "To have more renewables, we need more interconnectivity." he said.

In particular, Tanaka threw his weight behind a proposal to lay two sea cables between Norway and the UK, which would let the UK draw on Norwegian hydropower when British windmills go still.

Norway's glacier lakes and roaring rivers already provide electricity for almost every household in the country as well as power companies in other Nordic countries and the Netherlands. When hydro capacity is low, Norway imports power from those same countries.

Christian Rynning-Toennesen, the chief executive officer of Statkraft, a state-owned company that operates more than 100 hydropower plants in Norway, called for the country to become the "battery of Europe."

Tanaka said he approved of the image. "Connecting Norwegian hydropower to the bigger European market would be far better than relying on gas for the same purpose," said Tanaka, whose Paris-based agency advises 28 member countries on energy issues.

Norway's minister of petroleum and energy, Terje Riis-Johansen, said he and the UK's minister of energy, Charles Hendry, agreed earlier this week to support an ongoing feasibility study of connecting the two countries by cable. "There is big interest in the UK in building cables from Norway," he told Reuters. "But we are having similar discussions with Germany and other countries. I think Norway's future in Europe is to be a peak producer that always has power stored. If we do that right, it can neutralize the bad aspect of big windmill projects, which is that their production is inconsistent."

The feasibility study of a 700-km dual-cable link between southwestern Norway and eastern England is to be completed within a few months, said Stewart Larque, a spokesman for the UK National Grid. ... The country is nearing completion of a subsea power link to the Netherlands and considering a second one to France. But Larque said the lure of carbon-free power from Norway is great.

The Statkraft CEO said the cost of a cable link, which is not known, would probably be born by its beneficiaries at both ends. "For the British it would cost a lot less than building new power plants as a back-up for wind," said Rynning-Toennesen.

REW has an article on a new proposal for a north sea supergrid - Stakeholders Team Up To Expand Europe's Super-Grid.

Europe has plenty of grid initiatives to help meets its ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the help of renewable energies, such as wind and solar. Now it just needs an action plan. All the talk over the years about building new long-distance high-voltage transmission infrastructure to span national territories has, for the most part, remained just that.

But experts say the talk has now advanced to a new level, especially in the area of offshore infrastructure in northern Europe where around 100 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind power are planned.

Indicative of the growing momentum, yet another initiative recently entered the fray: the Friends of the Super-Grid. The group consists of established players in the energy logistics chain, including Areva of France, Prysmian of Italy, and Mainstream Renewable Power of Ireland as well as Germany’s Siemens and Hochtief. It has proposed a “phase one” project to connect England, Scotland, Germany and Norway at a cost estimated of around €34 billion.

That amount is close to the €30 billion projected by the North Sea Countries Offshore Grid Initiative. That group, which launched at the end of last year, consists of the European Union member states Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom as well as Norway, which is not part of the EU. Its goal is to spur construction of an offshore grid in the North Sea with connecting installations on the mainland. The countries hope to sign a memorandum of Understanding (MoU) later this year and lay the foundation for action. ...

Greenpeace has looked at the costs of building high-voltage, long-distance onshore and offshore grids across Europe. The organization estimates that 34 existing high-voltage alternating current (HVAC) interconnections will need to be upgraded between neighboring countries at a cost of about €3 billion. At least another 17 high-voltage direct current (HVDC) interconnections will need to be installed for about €16 billion. And up to 11 new long-distance HVDC super-grid connections will be required for around €100 billion. The International Energy Agency (IEA), looking at only an upgrade of existing transmission assets in Europe, estimates investment of about € 200 billion through 2030

Business Green has an article on a new group promoting the creation of a European super grid - European energy giants unveil Supergrid vision.

Ten of Europe's largest energy and engineering firms today joined forces to launch a new lobby group committed to advancing plans for a pan-European Supergrid capable of supporting new renewable energy capacity.

The Friends of the Supergrid (FOSG) group brings together renewable energy developers, producers of advanced transmission cables, engineering firms and grid operators.

The founding members include 3E, AREVA T&D, DEME Blue Energy, Elia, Hochtief Construction AG, Mainstream Renewable Power, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Prysmian Cables & Systems, Siemens and Visser & Smit Marine Contracting.

Speaking at the launch of the new group, Mainstream Renewable Power's chief executive Dr Eddie O'Connor said the coalition of companies could play a key role in promoting an idea that will be essential to the long-term decarbonisation of Europe's economies.

"The UK government has recently shown its commitment to large-scale offshore wind by announcing the development of up to 50GW by 2020," he said. "We now need to integrate this huge resource into Europe to enable the open trade of electricity between member states. The FOSG is uniquely placed to influence policy-makers towards creating the Supergrid and, ultimately, change how we generate, transmit and consume electricity for generations to come."

Experts have long argued that the development of a Supergrid will make it far easier for grid operators to manage intermittent energy supplies from renewable resources such as offshore wind farms, allowing them to export excess power when winds are good and import energy from other regions when poor winds result in less power.

The concept is now climbing up the political agenda after nine EU member states, including the UK and Germany, signed up to the N orth Seas Countries Offshore Grid Initiative (NSCOGI) late last year, agreeing to co-operate on the development of a grid that will allow them to share energy produced by new offshore wind farms.

Meanwhile, in Germany the Destertec consortium of firms is working on plans for a similar supergrid designed to import power from solar farms in North Africa to much of continental Europe.

C;eantech.com reports that Al Gore has been talking up smart and super grids at a recent venture capital conference - Al Gore: Super grid is critical to combating the climate crisis.

The used-to-be next president of the United States, as he calls himself, is all for putting a price on carbon, a cap and trade system, and overcoming political obstacles to combat climate change.

But what the American environmentalist and venture capitalist Al Gore—who has won everything from the Nobel Peace Prize to an Academy Award and Grammy for his documentary and book "The Inconvenient Truth"—came to San Mateo, Calif., yesterday to talk about was the super grid.

He said the smart grid is "at the heart" of developing renewable energy and empowering people to get to higher levels of efficiency.

Gore was the final keynote speaker at VentureBeat’s GreenBeat 2009 conference, focused on the smart grid. He also managed to plug the release of his new book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” which outlines what he thinks needs to happen to achieve a super grid—a revamped electrical grid aimed at saving energy, diversifying energy sources, and decarbonizing power use to slow global warming.

“This roller coaster is about to crash, and we are in the front car,” he said, of America's dependence on foreign oil and dwindling new discoveries of it.

"Last Oil Shock" author David Strahan has a look at an expanded electricity grid, mentioning Bucky Fuller's supergrid proposal - Green Grid.

Thomas Edison might have relished the irony. Just as his most famous legacy, the incandescent light bulb, heads for extinction, his other great passion, direct current, is set to boom. The bulb that dominated lighting for over a century is now a pariah of climate change and banned in many countries. Meanwhile direct current, which was defeated by alternating current in the race to establish the industry standard during the 1890s, is now emerging as crucial weapon in the fight against global warming, in the form of high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines.

Although the world’s electricity transmission grids are almost wholly AC, it is now becoming clear that HVDC will be crucial to meeting soaring electricity demand and cutting carbon emissions – by transmitting large amounts of power efficiently over long distances and connecting remote offshore wind farms. HVDC even promises to solve the vexed problem of the intermittency of wind turbines and solar panels by allowing the creation of continent-wide ‘Supergrids’, which smooth out the variable generation from many far-flung sources to create a dependable supply. Supporters claim this will make it possible to ditch coal, gas and nuclear altogether and replace them entirely with renewables within a couple of decades.

Elements of a European Supergrid are already beginning to emerge, with plans for offshore HVDC grids being developed in both the Baltic and the North Sea. And political momentum behind the idea is growing: in January the European Commission proposed €300 million to subsidize the development of HVDC links between Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, as part of a wider €1.2 billion package supporting links to offshore wind farms and cross-border interconnectors throughout Europe. Meanwhile the recently founded Union of the Mediterranean has embraced a Mediterranean Solar Plan to import large amounts of concentrating solar power into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East.

In the US, President Obama’s $150 billion energy plan includes a target of 25 per cent renewable electricity by 2025, implying massive investment in high voltage lines. A recent report from the US Department of Energy found that achieving 20 per cent wind penetration would require new ‘transmission superhighways’ stretching more than 12,000 miles. America’s existing 200,000 mile high voltage transmission network is almost entirely AC, but many of the new lines are likely to be HVDC. According to Dr Graeme Bathurst, technical director of the British grid consultancy TNEI, “Whichever way you look at it, there is absolutely no doubt that HVDC’s time has come”.

It is ironic that Edison lost his ‘battle of the currents’ with Tesla and Westinghouse because in one sense direct current is far superior; it suffers much lower transmission losses than alternating current. That’s because in a DC line the voltage is constant, whereas in an AC line it reverses direction 100 times per second, meaning more energy is lost as waste heat. Because of this, HVDC has long enjoyed a niche role transporting large amounts of power efficiently over long distances. One of the earliest big projects was a 600MW link in New Zealand connecting the north and south islands, built in 1965, and later upgraded to 1200MW.

One disadvantage of HVDC lines is the need for converter stations where they connect to an AC grid. These are big and expensive: for a 3000MW line the converter stations at either end would cover 9 football pitches and cost around $200 million each. But once the link is longer than about 600km, the extra cost is increasingly outweighed by the energy savings, making it economic to transport power over vast distances that with AC would be expensive and technically difficult

The length and capacity of new HVDC projects is rising fast, particularly in China, where lines are being built to transmit hydro power from deep in the country’s interior to consumers on the coast. The Swiss engineering firm ABB has recently been commissioned to build a link from the Xianjiaba dam to industrial Shanghai, which is the world’s longest, at 2000km, and most powerful, at 6.4GW - equivalent to the output of three large power stations. The line’s converter stations will cover 20 football pitches each, but when the project opens in 2011, the company says it will deliver major environmental benefits.

Dr Gunnar Asplund, ABB’s research and development manager for HVDC, explains that enormous amounts of power will be transmitted along a single line of pylons, whereas a traditional AC link would need three abreast. And because the alternative to transporting hydro electricity long distance would have been to build more coal fired power stations near Shanghai, Dr Asplund reckons the carbon dioxide savings could amount to 40 million tonnes per year.

Another major advantage of HVDC is that it can operate over much greater distances underground and under water than AC. That’s because AC produces powerful alternating electric fields that cause large additional energy losses if the line is buried or submerged, whereas for DC this ‘capacitance’ effect is practically negligible. That makes HVDC essential for sub-sea ‘interconnectors’, like the 600km NorNed cable between Norway and the Netherlands that opened last year.

NorNed was intended to reduce electricity prices by sending cheap Norwegian hydro power south during the day, and Dutch off-peak coal and gas fired power north by night. But this year has been exceptionally wet in Norway, making hydro-power so cheap that so far the trade has been almost all one way. That could easily reverse though, says Odd Hoelsaeter, the recently-retired chief executive of the Norwegian grid operator Statnett, “in a dry year like we had in 2002-3, we would be massive importers. Quite apart from the trading benefits, this is a major increase in energy security for both our countries”.

HVDC will also be essential for connecting the more remote offshore wind farms now being planned off Britain and Germany, although this will depend on a new generation known as voltage source converter (VSC) technology, which ABB markets as HVDC Light, and Siemens as HVDC Plus. That’s because, unlike classic HVDC, VSC does not require a strong AC grid at both ends in order to function, and its converter stations are compact enough to fit on an offshore platform.

Perhaps the biggest potential role for HVDC will be to enable the ‘Supergrid’ concept now gaining support in Europe and America. The idea itself is not new - it was first proposed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s – but only now is it becoming a practical possibility because of advances in HVDC technology.

Since 2003, Desertec, an organization founded by the Club of Rome and the National Energy Research Center of Jordan, has promoted one version of the Supergrid based largely on concentrating solar power (CSP) in North Africa and the Middle East. CSP is still relatively expensive, but one big advantage is that some of the heat captured during the day can be stored in molten salts and used to generate electricity overnight, and Desertec says this technology alone could supply 17% of Europe’s power by 2050, imported over 20-40 long-distance HVDC lines. But other supporters of the concept argue that the Supergrid could deliver even more - a wholly renewable electricity supply.

The problem with renewable electricity – its detractors claim - is the wind doesn’t always blow, nor the sun always shine. But that is only true of a single location. The wind is always blowing somewhere, and sunrise and sunset come at different times depending on geographical location. So given a large enough grid, the variations in renewable generation should tend to even out, making the supply much more reliable overall.

The potentially huge impact of this ‘spatial smoothing’ has been demonstrated by Dr Gregor Czisch, an energy system consultant, who has made the first quantitative study of how to build an economically viable, wholly renewable electricity supply for Europe and its neighbours – an area stretching from Iceland to Kazakhstan, and down into North Africa (see map). To do this Dr Czisch used a technique called linear optimization, originally developed to solve complicated logistical problems, which is widely used in business. It took Czisch years to gather the necessary data, including detailed weather and electricity consumption data for the whole area, and investment costs for all the main renewable technologies.

Czisch then told the programme to devise the cheapest electricity supply system that could satisfy demand entirely from renewables. Based on all the data, the model would decide which forms of generation should be sited where, and plan the routes and capacity of the HVDC lines. The results were astonishing: not only could the electricity demand of more than a billion people be supplied solely from renewables throughout the year – the lights would never go out - but it also wouldn’t break the bank.

At first glance the numbers look enormous: the entire project would cost more than €1.5 trillion over 20 years, of which €128 billion would go on the Supergrid itself – the HVDC lines and equipment – and around €1.4 trillion on renewable generating capacity. But to put these figures in context, the International Energy Agency forecasts that the global power industry will have to invest $13.6 trillion by 2030 in any case, even under a business-as-usual scenario in which coal and gas continue to dominate the electricity supply. Under the Czisch plan the idea is that investment in clean technologies would displace spending on dirty ones, not add to it.

Or course wind and solar are currently more expensive than gas and coal fired plants – at least if the cost of emissions is excluded, or set unrealistically low - but one of the advantages of the Supergrid is that renewables can be sited in the best locations, where the wind and the sun are strongest and most consistent, meaning the efficiency and economics improve. And although the Supergrid itself would cost billions, because it represents only a small proportion of the total investment, the extra cost has little impact on the overall price of electricity. So even without factoring in a price for carbon, Czisch calculates the system could deliver power for less than 4.7 Euro cents per kilowatt hour, roughly the price of German wholesale electricity in 2005 when the study was completed.

Technology Review has a look at the need to expand our electrical grids in order to make better use of clean energy sources - Lifeline for Renewable Power.

Push through a bulletproof revolving door in a nondescript building in a dreary patch of the former East Berlin and you enter the control center for Vattenfall Europe Transmission, the company that controls northeastern Germany's electrical grid. A monitor displaying a diagram of that grid takes up most of one wall. A series of smaller screens show the real-time output of regional wind turbines and the output that had been predicted the previous day. Germany is the world's largest user of wind energy, with enough turbines to produce 22,250 megawatts of electricity. That's roughly the equivalent of the output from 22 coal plants--enough to meet about 6 percent of Germany's needs. And because Vattenfall's service area produces 41 percent of German wind energy, the control room is a critical proving ground for the grid's ability to handle renewable power.

Like all electrical grids, the one that Vattenfall manages must continually match power production to demand from homes, offices, and factories. The challenge is to maintain a stable power supply while incorporating elec­tricity from a source as erratic as wind. If there's too little wind-generated power, the company's engineers might have to start up fossil-fueled power plants on short notice, an inefficient process. If there's too much, it could overload the system, causing blackouts or forcing plants to shut down.

The engineers have few options, however. The grid has a limited ability to shunt extra power to other regions, and it has no energy-storage capacity beyond a handful of small facilities that pump water into uphill reservoirs and then release it through turbines during periods of peak demand. So each morning, as offices and factories switch their power on, the engineers must use wind predictions to help decide how much electricity conventional plants should start producing.

But those predictions are far from perfect. As more and more wind turbines pop up in Germany, so do overloads and shortages caused by unexpected changes in wind level. In 2007, ­Vattenfall's engineers had to scrap their daily scheduling plans roughly every other day to reconfigure electricity supplies on the fly; in early 2008, such changes became necessary every day. Power plants had to cycle on and off inefficiently, and the company had to make emergency electricity purchases at high prices. Days of very high wind and low demand even forced the Vattenfall workers to quickly shut the wind farms down.

Vattenfall's problems are a preview of the immense challenges ahead as power from renewable sources, mainly wind and solar, starts to play a bigger role around the world. To make use of this clean energy, we'll need more transmission lines that can transport power from one region to another and connect energy-­hungry cities with the remote areas where much of our renewable power is likely to be generated. We'll also need far smarter controls throughout the distribution system--technologies that can store extra electricity from wind farms in the batteries of plug-in hybrid cars, for example, or remotely turn power-hungry appliances on and off as the energy supply rises and falls.

If these grid upgrades don't happen, new renewable-power projects could be stalled, because they would place unacceptable stresses on existing electrical systems. According to a recent study funded by the European Commission, growing electricity production from wind (new facilities slated for the North and Baltic Seas could add another 25,000 megawatts to Germany's grid by 2030) could at times cause massive overloads. In the United States, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nongovernmental organization set up to regulate the industry after a huge 1965 blackout, made a similar warning in November. "We are already operating the system closer to the edge than in the past," says the group's president, Rick Sergel. "We simply do not have the transmission capacity available to properly integrate new renewable resources."

The challenge facing the United States is particularly striking. Whereas Germany already gets 14 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, the United States gets only about 1 percent of its electricity from wind, solar, and geothermal power combined. But more than half the states have set ambitious goals for increasing the use of renewables, and president-elect Barack Obama wants 10 percent of the nation's electricity to come from renewable sources by the end of his first term, rising to 25 percent by 2025. Yet unlike Germany, which has begun planning for new transmission lines and passing new laws meant to accelerate their construction, the United States has no national effort under way to modernize its system. "A failure to improve our grid will be a significant burden for the development of new renewable technologies," says Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, CA, that has invested heavily in energy technologies.

Technology Review has an article on efforts to expand and modernise the European energy grid, easing the way for large scale renewables, particularly offshore -Europe Backs Supergrids.

Last month, the European Commission (EC) called for construction of regional electric transmission connections across the North Sea, around the Baltic region, and around the Mediterranean Sea, to distribute solar and wind power to and across Europe. It's all part of a plan to boost renewable energy from 8.5 percent of European energy consumption to 20 percent by 2020--and even more thereafter.

But the EC, the European Union's executive body, acknowledges that getting these so-called supergrids built will mean forging new agreements between European countries for transmission planning and investment--much as the United States needs more cooperation between states to, for example, move wind power from the Midwest to major cities. "The wind power which consumers demand cannot be delivered without new networks," the EC report says, and "there is little strategic planning" between nations to build the required connections.

However, several recent developments suggest that progress on transmission between European nations is possible. This summer, for example, a negotiator appointed by the EC convinced France to accept a new transmission connection with Spain, breaking a 15-year impasse over expanding power exchanges between the countries. Use of high-voltage DC (HVDC) technology will enable planners to bury the new line and thereby overcome local opposition to conventional overhead AC transmission lines.

The French-Spanish connection will help both countries balance power supply and consumption--especially Spain, which struggles at times to accommodate its installations of highly variable wind power, the largest in Europe. EC negotiator Mario Monti estimated that the link, called an interconnection, would reduce reliance on the countries' least efficient power plants, thus avoiding 1.5 million tons per year of carbon-dioxide emissions (roughly the annual emissions of 600,000 cars).

Christian Kjaer, CEO of the European Wind Energy Association, a Brussels-based trade group, calls it a "major breakthrough" that shows how Europe can overcome entrenched opposition to such interconnections. "It's a good example of why we need more than a national approach," says Kjaer.

Meanwhile, proposals for HVDC grids to deliver clean power from offshore wind farms to European consumers are getting more detailed. In September, for example, Brussels-based environmental consulting firm 3E mapped out a blueprint for what a North Sea offshore wind-power grid might look like. In 3E's design, 3,500 miles of underwater HVDC cables crisscross the North Sea, forming a network capable of hooking up 68,000 megawatts' worth of new offshore wind farms--enough generating capacity to meet 13 percent of the region's power consumption.

Earth2Tech reports that England may be left out of Scottish plans to join a European supergrid crossing the north sea - Scotland Snubbing England in Supergrid Plans?.

The Scottish government believes the North Sea could become host to an underwater renewable energy grid, supplying power from wind, wave and tidal power across Europe, but England could be left out in the cold. A new study from Scotland looks at the possibility of a supergrid between Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, but doesn’t mention Scotland’s big neighbor to the south.

Yes, Scotland is still part of the UK, and most of England’s east coast is also on the North Sea, but the word “England” doesn’t even show up once in the 21-page study and “UK” is only used in a couple of footnotes. It might just be an oversight, but the possible snub comes during the same week in which the UK government made a filing with the Commission on Scottish Devolution questioning the Scottish government’s powers covering energy.

Political wrangling aside, there’s a big push for wind and marine power in the UK, not just in Scotland, so the area could become a hub for renewable energy in the region. In October, the UK government said it surpassed Denmark to take the top spot in offshore wind power in the world, boasting 590 megawatts of offshore wind vs. Denmark’s 423 megawatts.

Sweden’s Vattenfall just announced plans to invest in wind power in the UK, teaming up with ScottishPower Renewables to make joint bids on offshore wind development, including areas in the North Sea. The two plan to build 6,000 megawatts of installed wind power capacity.

ScottishPower, part of Spain’s Iberdrola, is also looking at marine power, releasing plans in September to build up to 60 megawatts of tidal power capacity in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The UK’s Crown Estate, which owns the seabed around the country, recently opened up the Pentland Firth off of northern Scotland for commercial wave and tidal projects, aiming to generate more than 700 MW of power by 2020.

There are already big projects going on in England and if there was Scottish-only supergrid, it would lose out on connecting to the planned 1-gigawatt London Array offshore wind farm as well as the Wave Hub project.

A recent plan from Greenpeace for a €20 billion ($25.032 billion) renewable energy grid in the area was much more inclusive, with both England and Scotland making the list, as well as France. However, the environmental group did neglect Sweden, which only has access to the North Sea through the Skagerrak strait.

The Scottish government is still working on its plans for a North Sea supergrid and estimated that it would need £409,200 ($606,475) and about 17 months to do a full study on the project.

Global Public Media has an interview with Mark Ennis of Airtricity, talking about the European supergrid idea.

A high voltage electricity grid connecting countries from the North Sea to the Bay of Biscay could provide almost a third of Europe's power by 2030, according to the company behind the idea. The system would improve energy security, cut emissions, and even reduce the price of power at times of peak demand.

The supergrid is the brainchild of Irish wind generator Airtricity - recently acquired by Scottish and Southern Energy for €1.1 billion - and would connect countries as far apart as Norway and Spain to each other's offshore wind farms. When the wind blows in one country but not in others, power would be directed through the high voltage direct current (HVDC) network to wherever it is needed most.

According to Mark Ennis, Airtricity's Executive Director for Strategy and Public Policy, the system will solve the Achilles heel of wind generation. In an interview with lastoilshock.com and Global Public Media, Ennis said "By having a very large grid over several thousand kilometers you take the variability out, you almost come out with base load energy"

Speaking on the sidelines of the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi last week, Ennis went on to say that the HVDC technology is proven, that existing financial incentives are already sufficient to make the idea viable, and that a regulatory agreement between countries is close: "I think we are nearly there". If work starts soon, Ennis claimed, the supergrid could supply 30% of Europe's power by 2030.

The initial investment would be huge, but would be spread between grid operators, such as the National Grid in Britain, and Eon Netzt in Germany, and wind farm operators. However, by directing electricity to where demand - and prices - are highest, according to Ennis the system should reduce peak demand for fossil fuels and therefore bring costs down.

Tuscon, Ariz.-based Global Solar Energy announced today that its thin-film solar cells hit a milestone, reaching an average of 10 percent efficiency. The company said its copper indium gallium diselenide cells achieved the efficiency over several production runs.

"This is the culmination of three full years of being in production and evolving our proprietary production techniques to continuously improve the efficiency and output of our production," said Jeffrey Britt, VP of technology at Global Solar.

Global Solar said it hit the milestone in December, capping off a year in which it said it also manufactured and shipped 4 megawatts of photovoltaic material for commercial, government, military and consumer products.