Really worthwhile video on approaches for transporting and storing wind energy.
A European “supergrid” connecting the electricity network of Britain to those of mainland Europe could cut the cost of connecting offshore wind farms to the land by a quarter, a panel of U.K. lawmakers said.
Investment in offshore power transmission could also create 775,000 jobs across Europe by 2020, Parliament’s Energy and Climate Change Committee said today in an e-mailed study. It recommended that new wind farms are connected in a way that’s compatible with a supergrid, rather than using individual connections to shore. The government wants to boost offshore wind capacity to 18 gigawatts in 2020 from 1.3 gigawatts now.
“If we continue developing these renewable resources site- by-site, it could be prohibitively expensive,” committee chair Tim Yeo, a lawmaker with the ruling Conservatives, said in a statement. “An integrated and interconnected offshore network would allow us to tap these huge resources cost-efficiently and prepare the ground for a future European supergrid.”
The idea of a supergrid has been promoted by companies including Siemens AG (SIE), General Electric Co. (GE) and National Grid Plc (NG/) to make it easier to balance demand with intermittent power generation across Europe, from solar farms in Mediterranean nations to offshore wind turbines in the North Sea.
Creating the grid could eventually cost 200 billion euros ($275 billion), with a first stage of 28 billion euros by 2020, Mainstream Renewable Power Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Eddie O’Connor told the U.K. panel during its evidence sessions.
Some of the terminology used in the video made this electrical engineer’s ears hurt, but this was a very cool visual representation of what is to be accomplished.
It was a video obviously aimed at investors, policy makers, and tax payers. You can’t be throwing around terms like capacitance, inductance, resistance, impedance, and power factor in a video like this. Nevertheless, it should show North Americans what is possible when when a society isn’t so affected by lobbyist-based politics.
I say, “let the engineers do their job” which is to provide cheaper and cleaner energy. This video describes ultra clean “fuel free” energy. If manufacturing ever came back to North America, how would we ever compete with this? (answer: we wouldn’t be able to)
This is a great video; people have been working on high-voltage DC transmission for a long time, and this seems like a nice solution. Its ramifications go much further than merely making wind power cheaper: high-voltage DC lines allow far-flung electricity generators to be integrated more efficiently, so that we can balance power loads on the grid over a wider range of sources. If the wind dies down in the North Sea, perhaps there is still plenty of wind in Scotland to make up for it. It makes it possible for southern European countries to invest in lots of solar PV and sell the power to northern European countries.
The basic result of this is to permit highly variable sources of electricity to be tied together into larger, more balanced systems.
This this world of technology,All technology depend upon energy, We should have enough energy to full fil our need Awesome video.
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