EU-Africa supergrid links- back again?

The idea of supergrid power links around and across the Mediterranean is not new. There were plans by the Germany-based Desertec initiative, set up in 2009, to build links to major concentrated solar power (CSP)  projects in North Africa. However, despite a lot of early enthusiasm and detailed analysis, along with debates over the strategic pros and cons, it came to naught. It was seen as easier to generate power from solar and wind in Europe- Germany’s indigenous renewables were starting their big boom. There were also political issues – wasn’t it just a bit of rich Northern exploitation of resources in the poor South?  

Nevertheless some of the ideas and individual projects survived, as did the idea promoted by the EU of a ‘med ring’ for power trading. And as the use of renewable spreads across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) area, Desertec-type ideas may now be moving ahead again. That should not be surprising. The desert solar resource is after all vast, and it ought to be possible to develop it in a non-exploitative way. The technology is developing fast too, both for generation (solar PV as well as CSP) and for long distance transmission via low-loss High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) grid links.   

Writing in PV magazine Sara Fountir Benbrahim notes that ‘the MedRing project, initiated in 2010, aimed to connect 22 electricity networks between countries around the Mediterranean, from Morocco via Spain, crossing thousands of kilometers to North Africa and the Middle East, with loop ends connecting Syria to Turkey, and Turkey to the continental European system via Greece and Bulgaria.’ 

She says ‘the objective of this unprecedented construction was to establish a Euro-Mediterranean electricity market. The pilot project, which initiated multiple interconnection tests, didn’t succeed. Although the Maghreb blocks, consisting of Morocco, Algeria, & Tunisia, had demonstrated their effectiveness, the Mashreq block, from Egypt to Syria, showed fluctuations from a disrupted electricity network in the area’. 

However things have now changed, since, she says, ‘the spread of ambitious renewable energy strategies have resulted in a surplus of  energy.’ Most Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) & North African countries ‘experienced a power surplus in 2020, while several countries in the Levant region - namely Lebanon and Iraq - experienced a deficit’. So there is now more of an incentive to trade power-although there are still issues: ‘While the GCC interconnection infrastructure is already in place and operational since 2016, it has a utilization rate below 10%. Its main uses thus far have been for emergency and reserve sharing through bilateral contracts’. She says part of the problem was that ‘Saudi Arabia’s power system operates at a frequency of 60Hz while the other systems are at 50Hz, the interconnection includes back-to-back HVDC converter stations to connect Saudi Arabia’s 380kV 60Hz system to the 400kV 50Hz power systems. This has significantly delayed inter-connector projects between the GCC and the wider MENA area.’

Fortunately though she reports, ‘the recent interconnection project between Saudi Arabia and Egypt has opened the door to new projects in the area. The $1.6 billion project to improve system reliability and energy imports is gaining momentum in the region. Allowing the daily exchange of up to 3GW at peak times, it is expected to facilitate two complex markets to deliver both increasing cost savings and efficiency gains, especially with rising demand and growing shares of renewables in their power mix’.

And there is more to come, with ‘in addition to the cross MENA inter-connector projects, more ambitious projects plan to boost EU-MENA inter-connectors such as Egypt with Europe via Greece, and Tunisia to Italy’. An finally, a bold plan ‘to connect Morocco with the United Kingdom via 3,800 kilometers of HVDC sub-sea cables’ is being studied and there is also a study underway for a Morocco-Portugal inter-connector of 1GW capacity.

So there may well soon be some substantial developments, driven by the expansion of renewables. The article notes that Morocco, which is now on track to increase its share of renewables in electricity to 60-65% by 2030, ‘has two 400kV submarine cables with a combined nominal capacity of 1.4GW between Spain & Morocco demonstrate that linking MENA to the EU is feasible. These links are Europe’s only electricity interconnections with MENA’. But if the various projects mentioned in this useful article work out, that may soon change. Though, as ever, in many places, the geopolitics may be hard to resolve.

However, while the politics may be complex, perhaps the most interesting and crucial issue is whether any of this will add up to a system that can help balance the local variability of renewable. In theory, regions where there are power surpluses at a particular point in time can export power to those where there is a deficit. Everyone gains. But it is not clear if there will always be power available to import when needed or markets available to sell power when there is an excess. System modelling can give some idea of the amounts of energy likely to be involved, but modelling complete market trading systems and the price interactions that would result is hard. 

Nevertheless, efforts are made to estimate the cost and benefits of integrated systems. One such study by University College Dublin’s Energy Institute concluded that a Europe-wide supergrid could cut almost a third from energy costs.  UCD says ‘The 32% cost reduction identified is borne primarily from the expansion of European power flows - derestricting them to allow the location of renewable generation to be optimised, thereby significantly decreasing the total installed capacity’.

That is all about international trading of energy and not everyone thinks that is a secure and reliable option, especially now, given Russia’s role in this activity in terms of gas supply. Some say that local storage will be a better bet, for a more reliable, locally controlled, energy system. Though that is harder for power than it is for gas. In practice we may need both, storage and trading, as well as power and gas, but that may depend on local regional requirements and capacities. In some countries and areas, large scale power storage (e.g. pumped hydro, compressed air or green hydrogen cavern storage) will be easier than in others. While trading in green hydrogen may be an option at some point, fossil gas imports and trading could be much trickier for the EU after Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, and for Germany in particular, given its decision not to use the new Nord stream 2 pipeline from Russia. Building new power interlinks across the EU might now look wise. Indeed, and more than symbolically, it has already started, with Ukraine and Moldova linking up in a trial with the EU grid. But that’s in parallel with decoupling from the Russian grid - grid links and their removals can clearly be part of local geo-political battles. 

Looking more widely, EU links with the MENA region may also now seem more attractive, so supergrids may yet flourish, especially since the EU is not alone in considering supergrid power links. China is one of the leaders in the development of high-capacity UHVDC transmission, although so far only internally, with over 35 000 kilometres of HVDC transmission lines and 500 billion kWh of annual transmission. This network is being developed since it is a huge country, with long distances between the main renewable resources and the main power demand centres.  However, its renewable resource is very large so there may at time be surpluses, and there has been interest in longer distance exports, possibly via links to Europe. For the moment though, in most places, it’s still a matter of taking relatively small steps to connect up local and regional systems and then extend them so as to get power trading and balancing benefits. But longer term, there may be much more and much wider integration, with the idea of global grid then not being quite so far off.