Christoph Herwartz, correspondent in the Handelsblatt office in Brussels, analyzes trends and conflicts, regulatory projects and strategic concepts from the inner workings of the EU. Because anyone interested in business needs to know what’s going on in Brussels. You can reach him at [email protected]
Brussels The future of the energy industry should be smart: networked and flexible. A lull in the North Sea should be compensated for by the sunshine in the Spanish desert or hydroelectric power from Sweden.
The fact is, however, that the European energy grids are not designed for this. For a climate-neutral future, not only offshore fields and solar parks are missing, but also the cables to distribute the electricity.
Germany knows the problem: there is still an unmanageable number of planning, approval procedures and citizen participation to be completed before electricity can flow from the north to the south.
At the European level, the problem is many times greater. Transmission lines across France would be needed before electricity from Spain could reach German sockets. There isn’t. The Spanish and French networks are poorly interconnected at all, like many other networks in the EU.
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Covering the continent with a network of high-voltage lines is not within the competence of the EU. It is therefore content with promoting interconnectors, i.e. interfaces between the networks of neighboring member states.
That doesn’t really get going either. Some projects were defined years ago as “projects of common interest” without much happening. In most cases it is probably because the network operators on both sides do not see it as their task to advance such projects. At least there is no lack of money, according to Brussels.
In the event of a gas shortage, Germany could be supplied with liquid gas via Spanish LNG terminals
One project that is well advanced is the interconnector between Germany and Great Britain. So far, the British have been getting a large part of their electricity from Ireland and France. In a few years they should then also be able to use German power plants and – according to the British idea – export wind power themselves.
Wind farms that are currently being built are to be connected directly to the grids of several countries. This creates larger spaces in which electricity supply and demand can balance each other out.
Those are the right approaches. However, there is no plan for how electricity could be exchanged across Europe.
>> Read here: That wasn’t an argument – the taxonomy is just the beginning
Things are looking a little better for gas: many pipelines have been converted to “reverse flow”. They can then not only bring gas from the east to the west, but also direct it in the other direction. This was a consequence of the gas crisis of 2009, when Russia and Ukraine could not agree on the conditions for transit and some states were no longer supplied.
This means that there is at least the theoretical possibility that Germany will be supplied with liquid gas via Spanish LNG terminals in the event of a gas shortage, as is currently the case. In the future, hydrogen could be brought to Europe and distributed in the same way.
But there are also too few transfer points between the networks of the EU countries for gas. The amount that could come over Spain is therefore very limited. A “Hydrogen Backbone”, i.e. a Europe-wide efficient network for hydrogen, is so far only a vision without a concrete implementation path.
Absurd, many in Brussels think. Almost all goods can be traded freely in the EU internal market, only energy does not have the right conditions. With the taxonomy, the EU has precisely defined for all countries which energy production should be considered sustainable. There is Europe-wide emissions trading for CO2, the CO2 border adjustment is intended to protect Europe from dirty cheap imports, and the other laws of the “Fit for 55” package will define Europe-wide how the path to a climate-neutral future is.
The EU has taken over climate policy. But when it comes to how energy is generated and distributed, it is still powerless.
More on this: Germany is radically converting its power grid – these are the three biggest construction sites.