How Elia is advancing to meet the REPowerEU 2030 targets

The two main actions for Elia Group are increasing the levels of renewables in the system and the complementary reinforcement of the grid says CEO Chris Peeters.

In a Connect interview at Enlit Europe, Peeters said that a strong grid in the Group’s two countries of operation – Belgium and Germany – is essential both to integrating more renewables and to the electrification of households and industry with its ability to meet the increased demand.

And with the falling costs of renewables, they now offer the cheapest option for large energy users over conventional fossil fuel supplies.

“It’s not only a question of is it affordable, the question is, can we afford not to go there?” says Peeters.

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“So it’s an important element as we drive the energy transition because it’s not only about climate change, it’s also about anchoring industry in Europe.”

While ‘affordability’ is one aspect of the renewables challenge, the other is ‘feasibility’ with the additional need for storage to manage the flexibility and Peeters said he is now much more optimistic about that than previously.

He explains that each year Elia does a major study on the grid of the future and the last study was focused on a 100% renewable driven grid, investigating flexibilities in different time scales – short-term day-night, three days to two weeks, i.e. the typical wind cycle, seasonality with more demand in winter than summer but also less solar production and prolonged cold spells.

“The question was ‘can it function’, not ‘that is what we want to do’,” he said, stating findings that the very short term can be easily solved with the flexibility of the electrification coming into the grid such as the batteries in EVs. The medium scale can be solved with grid interconnections so that either sun or wind can be delivered to demand centres. The seasonal cycle can be solved by having the right balance between wind and sun, probably a slight overbalance of wind, and for cold spells, back-up capacity is needed.

And these all have different time-scales for when they are required. For example, the backup capacity for cold spells can be managed currently with the existing flexible capacity in the system with the need for a solution only 20-plus years on and so is not an urgent problem today.

“We need to have a clear view of the whole system over the whole year cycle and to take the problems one by one.”

Consumer-centric approach

Turning to the consumer-centricity of Elia and 50Hertz as TSOs – companies that traditionally are not consumer facing – Peeters said that succeeding in the energy transition is about integrating more renewables into the system and managing it with flexibility at the demand side.

“If we want to reduce the cost of the system overall, the more flexibility that can participate, the better. So with our responsibility for balancing, we want to make all the flexibility that comes into the system liquid and remove all the barriers for participation and the best way to make that happen is with customer-centric solutions.”

He cited as an example the partnership with Octopus Energy in the UK offering such solutions.

“Here we have Octopus focusing on the consumer and Elia as the TSO making the underlying system work and this is the kind of partnerships that will be needed more and more to liquefy all the flexibility instead of building new dedicated capacity.”

In closing Peeters touched on the dual topics of security and safety, saying that on the security side Elia has cybersecurity in place to protect from cyber attacks and works with government entities and other organisations on physical security.

He commented that the situation in Ukraine has highlighted the challenge of dealing with prolonged and targeted attacks with limited supplies of critical equipment such as transformers.

“Any system that is so spread geographically will be vulnerable over time and that is something we have to start thinking about.”

Safety on the other hand he commented is about ensuring that the personnel, contractors and other third parties are protected in their contact with the company’s installations and that is about the strategy and that safety is included in every aspect of its execution.

“In Elia we have the slogan ‘We go for zero’, which basically means that if safety is a question, it is the only question there is. Make sure you are always safe!”

Watch the Connect Interview with Chris Peeters below or on Enlit.World