2023-04-23 04:00:00
This Monday, April 24, Belgium is hosting the second North Sea Summit. The Heads of State and Government of nine countries bordering the North Sea meet. Their ambition: to make this body of water the largest green energy plant in Europe. But, where is the production of wind energy today and what is the potential of this area?
Belgium now has a fully completed offshore wind farm. It has a production capacity of 2.2 gigawatts (GW), the equivalent of 2 nuclear reactors. Last year, it covered 8% of our country’s annual consumption.
We can counter the intermittency of renewables by expanding our network
Problem: this green energy is fluctuating: without wind, no electricity production. One solution: connect our electricity grid to the wind turbines of our neighbours.
“If there is no wind off the Belgian coast, there may be some elsewhere. There is a good chance that at that time we will have wind production which is available in Baltic Sea and therefore we can counter the intermittency of renewables by expanding our network at the off-shore level”says Jean Fassiaux, the spokesperson for Elia, the manager of the electricity transmission network.
Another solution to fight once morest intermittency: make hydrogen when wind turbines produce too much electricity. This surplus can be stored and reused later. A costly solution these days.
“The electrolyzers that are used to deal with these wind fluctuations are only used a small percentage of the time, so you are investing a lot of money in infrastructure that will only be used lightly, which further increases the cost of the hydrogen storage”points out Damien Ernst, professor at ULiège.
We will have to build many other electrical capacities with all the difficulties that implies
Belgium’s objective is to build a second wind farm. By 2050, it should quadruple the country’s offshore wind capacity. Our neighbors have similar ambitions. Together, the countries bordering the North Sea want to install more than 300 GW by 2050, the equivalent of 300 nuclear reactors that will then have to be interconnected.
“The idea is to build a real network, so it includes infrastructure, whether it’s submarine cables, whether it’s wind farms or whether it’s energy islands or platforms that will really allow the circulation of electricity and to convey it”explains Elia’s spokesperson.
“We can already see the difficulties there are in developing this Hainaut loop with a capacity of 6 GW. If we really want to sell 300 GW of wind power in continental Europe, we will have to build a lot of other electrical capacities in many European countries with all the difficulties that this implies”believes for his part Professor Damien Ernst.
Belgium intends to build the first artificial energy island in the world by 2026. An innovation that should make it possible to better connect the electricity networks of all our neighbors, but also to better exploit the electricity produced by Belgian wind turbines in the North Sea.
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