The European Electricity Grid System and Winter Peak Load Stress: For how long can the european grid system survive the ever increasing demand during cold winter days?

Abstract

The rich countries of Western Europe and its citizens benefited during at least the last 30 years from an extraordinary stable electricity grid. This stability was achieved by the european grid system and a large flexible and reliable spare power plant capacity. This system allowed a continuous demand growth during the past 10-20 years of up to a few % per year. However, partially due to this overcapacity, no new large power plants have been completed during the past 10-15 years. The obvious consequence is that the reliable spare capacity has been reduced and that a further yearly demand growth of 1-2% for electric energy can only be achieved if new power plants will be constructed soon. Data from various European countries, provided by the UCTE, indicate that the system stress during peak load times and especially during particular cold winter days is much larger than generally assumed. In fact, the latest UCTE data on reliable power capacity indicate that already during the Winter 2007/8 only a few very cold winter days in Western Europe could have resulted in very unpleasant supply problems during the early evening peak load times in France and the neighboring countries. An analysis of the potential to build and operate new power plants demonstrates that no short term solution, which allows a further continuous 1-2% consumption growth seems to exist. Thus, without any action from the various governments in Europe to reduce the electricity demand in a serious way, the risk of blackouts will increase dramatically in the near future. Instead of simply waiting for the blackout disaster to happen, a few simple short term political actions are suggested.