European TSOs map Northern Seas offshore grid
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The Offshore TSO Collaboration comprised of 12 European TSOs has avowed an offshore grid in the Northern Seas playing a crucial role in securing the region’s energy supply.
In a new analysis, the Collaboration has presented a set of potential cross-border projects that have been modelled to deliver benefits across the northern seas, i.e. the North Sea, Irish Sea and Celtic Sea.
Such an offshore grid, which would establish itself as ‘the green power plant of Europe’, would play a crucial role in the continent securing an independent, affordable and decarbonised energy supply, according to the Collaboration.
The basis of the concept is that the projects should be planned in a holistic way rather than on a project by project basis, enabling such a regional approach to offer both economic and environmental benefits while optimising the system costs.
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With around 300GW of offshore wind planned in Northern Seas countries, the offshore network infrastructure of the future is envisaged to encompass not only national, radial offshore connection systems but also bilateral and multilateral hybrid interconnectors, hydrogen infrastructure and energy hubs.
The map with a timeline ca 2040 includes three categories of projects – planned projects that are considered to be mature with regulatory approval in at least one country, promising projects that have shown strong economic benefits in analyses and could be technically feasible around 2040, and promising candidates that could have the potential to make a positive economic contribution subject to further investigation.
Trends apparent are that the general direction of corridors from north to south and west to east, indicated in earlier studies, is substantiated.
Usually, the related benefits are driven by the diversity of renewables across the Northern Seas. Connection of the large hydro-based system in Norway can help to balance the outputs of other renewables and the variance in wind patterns can lead to different outputs across the Northern Seas.
Given the large distances involved, weather systems can take many hours to pass across countries, while electricity can be exchanged at a rate which is close to the speed of light. Increasing the level of interconnection between collective electricity systems can therefore help to smooth out periods of over- or undersupply in a cost-effective way.
In its next step the Consortium intends to submit a set of these conceptual projects to the ENTSO-E Ten-Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP) 2026. These projects could serve as the foundation for joint cost-sharing negotiations between the involved countries.
The Offshore TSO Collaboration was launched in 2022 by the Northern Seas TSOs to advance infrastructure development in line with the aims of Esbjerg and Ostend declarations of 2022 and 2023 respectively on the development of offshore wind in these seas.
Members are 50Hertz, Amprion and TenneT (Germany), Creos (Luxembourg), EirGrid (Ireland), Elia (Belgium), Energinet (Denmark), National Grid and NESO (UK), RTE (France), Statnett (Norway) and TenneT (Netherlands).
The TSOs believe that a regional planning and coordination approach presents the greatest opportunities for Europe and they have issued a call for rapid scaling up of the offshore wind supply chain, with dedicated hubs across the EU to manufacture turbines, cables, platforms and other components.
They also have pointed to the needs for political and regulatory alignment with a robust framework that attracts greater investment as well as technical standardisation and harmonisation.
