North Sea Supergrid To Become Reality

Photo by james_jhs

It's been a year and a half now since the Scottish Government tried to talk to the Norwegian Government about building an interconnecting power grid. This would have allowed surplus Scottish wind energy to be transmitted to Norway when the wind was blowing, with previously-stored hydro-electric power being transmitted to Scotland when it was calm.

Unfortunately, the UK Government didn't like the idea of this and decided, in their own words, to "slap down" the Scots by telling the Norwegians to stop talking to us.

How dare those impudent Scots even think of talking to foreign governments!

Time and the world has moved on, and what the UK were saying was a bad idea is now to become a reality. Talks will progress this year on a North Sea Supergrid, which will link not only Scotland and Norway, but also Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Sweden.

Renewable energy will travel around the grid depending on where it is needed at any particular time. It's easy to imagine where the bulk of it is going to come from - Scotland's wind farms and Germany's Solar farms. Norway's dams will be used as "storage" for when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining.

For once, the EU has it's thinking right. This large scale Supergrid coupled with local microrenewables should see us going a long way to eliminating fossil fuels in the future, and the sooner it gets built and is online, the better.