The North Sea is turning green. The oil-rich region, which holds the EU’s largest reserves of fossil fuel, is now forecasted to generate half of all offshore wind capacity by 2050. That’s around 200GW, enough to keep the lights on in millions of European households.
That is, if we can find a way to deploy offshore wind energy where it’s needed. Connecting the largest producers of offshore wind to areas with high demand is one of the biggest challenges looming over the industry.
Building The Backbone Of Offshore Wind
The pressure will only continue to mount as climate deadlines tighten. The US, which is the second largest consumer of fossil fuel, will have to triple transmission rates to meet 2050 targets. That means building, and building fast. “The current power grid took 150 years to build. Now, to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, we must build that amount of transmission again in the next 15 years and then build that much more again in the 15 years after that,” says Jesse Jenkins, energy systems engineer and professor at Princeton University.
Europe’s existing transmission grid is under-equipped to distribute the 450GW capacity it is building towards. In order to meet its net neutrality ambitions, the EU will have to double power grid investments to €80 billion a year over the next 30 years.
These investments will be crucial for modernising an ageing power grid. Offshore wind may be taking off, but power grid development is struggling to keep pace. Expansion has slowed, from 2,200 kilometres since the 90s to only around 1,200 kilometres today. At the turn of the millennium, the rate was down to 250 kilometres.
Barriers To Expansion
Offshore wind has the potential to supply the world’s energy demands, even at a surplus. Yet without building the backbone needed to deliver all that power, much of the potential stands to go to waste. With all the recent excitement and activity pouring into the industry, what are the major hurdles stopping transmission projects from getting the same boost?
Local Communities Balk At Intrusion From The Sea
Towering at several hundreds of metres tall, turbines are the most conspicuous sources of renewable energy. While some see marvels of engineering, most, especially suburban communities, feel differently. Securing approval from locals is a considerable challenge for many onshore farm developments.
Miles away from shore, offshore wind farms face relatively weaker local opposition than their land-based counterparts. However, developers of transmission projects are set to face the same staunch resistance once plans come to shore.
One town in New Jersey is already at odds with Ørsted over plans to run cables through their beachfront, despite reassurances by the Danish offshore wind developer that the surface will remain undisturbed. Across the countryside of East Anglia, signs saying “No More Pylons, Bury Not Blight” relay the local populace’s push against plans for overhead cables that would ferry offshore wind energy into their homes.
These are only a couple of the skirmishes happening as developers push to build the needed onshore infrastructure for offshore wind farms.
The Complexity Of Cross-Border Integration
Negotiating and coordinating projects between multiple territories is extremely difficult. Every country has its own permitting processes and grid codes to follow. Transmission infrastructure projects can get bogged down in this tangle of applications and permits for years–time we don’t have if we are to build the capacity needed to hit net zero targets.
Even in the US, coordination between states is a problem. “At some point, we have to do away with short-sighted individual approaches and engage more in cross-border talk,” says Stefan Kansy, director of new projects for Energie Baden-Württemberg AG.
A Coordinated Effort To Go Green
At the political level, the imperative is to cut through the Gordian knot of red tape we find ourselves in, or risk missing climate targets. Nations need to enable a more agile decision making framework that reaches across national and regional levels. “Countries also need to improve their planning practices and involve all stakeholders in grid planning. We need more cross-border planning and planning processes at EU level,” says Giles Dickson, CEO of WindEurope.
A simplified permitting procedure will also save projects from tripping over pedantic legal issues. “The more complex your permit application form is, the easier it is for a very well paid lawyer to find something in that form that you haven’t filled out quite correctly,” says Dickson.
Laying Out The Way Forward
Amongst themselves, grid operators in the EU are already banding together to form an integrated response to the continent’s transmission problem. Eurobar, a partnership of seven major transmission system operators, was formed in 2021. The group’s aim is to help future offshore developments efficiently integrate into the European power grid while minimising environmental impact.
Technologically, the field is rife with innovative concepts for optimising and integrating the current and future grid systems. Traditionally, offshore wind farms are connected by a single export cable. With more wind farms slated to be built, this approach is no longer working,creating a “spaghetti” of overlapping cables on the seabed.
To untangle the mess, one proposed solution is to connect multiple farms to an energy hub, allowing them to share a single link to the shore. Multi-connection islands can be used to trade excess energy between countries, integrating once isolated clusters into an optimised mesh that can supply multiple markets and reduce the infrastructure needed to connect to grids. Denmark is already building the foundations of its first “energy island”, which in the future can facilitate energy connections with neighbours such as Sweden and Germany.
Key to an integrated solution is to plan the construction of interconnectors and proposed projects in a specific area together, which should optimise the volume of cables needed by the network. It’s a strategy that should be simple on paper, but due to the many stakeholders involved, is more complicated to execute.
With offshore wind’s massive potential, net zero goals are within sight. But if we are to turn that potential into a green reality, there needs to be a coordinated effort between countries to simplify and unify the permitting, planning, and construction of transmission infrastructure.
