ABB: What is your personal vision of the future of our electrical power networks?
O’Connor: The world is on a once-off transition to sustainability which, by 2050, will largely be accomplished. As far as Europe is concerned, I expect that by 2050, half of the electricity will be made from wind, 30 percent from solar, 10 percent from other renewables, and 10 percent from nuclear. We have a fairly clear idea where the solar will come from – basically it has to come from the desert – and the future of wind energy will be largely offshore because a lot of the good wind sites on land will be built on by 2020. This wind energy also has to be rendered into a form that can be immediately used by grids, and for that you first of all need a big long grid, a grid that spreads over 5,000 kilometers, and of course that’s possible because of high-voltage DC technology, which will be the cornerstone of any new grid. We’re going to need 1 to 1.2 million megawatts of capacity built in the sea, and that’s going to give rise to the Supergrid in northern Europe.
Van Son: I have a similar view but will draw another perspective. If you look at the history of the electricity supply, we started in a very local way, connecting villages and cities, then regions, and later countries. Sources were built close to where there was demand, and that’s the structure that we basically still have. But now you see that the sources of electricity are becoming more distant and that the share of electricity in our energy consumption will increase through the addition of electric transportation and other demands on electricity. And that means there will be an increasing need for large scale transportation of electricity.
(Eddie O'Connor (left) and Paul van Son)
ABB: How important is speedy implementation?
O’Connor: It’s urgent, but most of humanity lives in a curtailed timeframe, and a lot of humanity actually lives in a past timeframe. Unfortunately the past is no guide to what’s going to happen. So we need to sit down and think how do you organize a set of grids largely in DC, which has never been done before? How do you switch a grid, how do you control a grid that’s in DC? So there’s a time dimension, and it’s all driven by politics. Fossils are in short supply and the world has to do something about it. All of those things take time, and they all need a lot of debate and reassurances.
Van Son: To the man on the street, a timeframe beyond a couple of years is very difficult to imagine. There’s a big problem actually in this debate because the real solution cannot be achieved within 10 years or so. It will take 30, 40, 50 years or more to achieve a major shift in production to renewables and other sources, develop the grid and increase penetration of electricity in the total energy mix. And that is the big problem for politicians and large institutions: if they work on very long-term plans, they risk losing touch with society. Tackling the climate threat involves cultural, political and financial issues that make it very challenging.
ABB: Your visions are large scale projects involving many countries and different interests. What strategies can align these interests and move them ahead?
O’Connor: In Europe it’s fairly clear: we’ve written a law for ourselves, which says that we must double our renewables by 2020. We have almost all the technology to hand. Where I see the real issue, is how do you get access to the Sahara?
Van Son: That’s true, it’s not easy. If it would be easy then I’m quite sure that there would already be many more developments. Technology is not the most difficult part of the chain here - it’s basically a cultural issue. Completely different cultures have evolved around the Mediterranean, with a lot of friction between them. We have to find out how these can be brought together and made productive. That’s the major challenge. All the rest can be solved much more easily.
ABB: Is it important that the average consumer also has the opportunity to participate in such projects?
O’Connor: In my opinion, no. When you were exploiting North Sea oil and gas, you didn’t go and ask the consumer, right?
Van Son: There’s two sides to the story. There’s nothing wrong with small decentralized power generation, but it should be economically feasible so that there’s competition between the large-scale supply of electricity and local electricity markets. But the real big thing in future will be the intercontinental flows of energy, connecting the sources and the big demand sites. In my view, this has nothing to do with renewables as such, but more to do with the shift between sources and demand. You may expect or wish the sources to become more renewable, but a Darwinian process will determine what survives and you can never say what will be the outcome over a timeframe of 40 or 50 years. I fully support the goal of climate protection, but there are other arguments that have to be considered, such as security of supply, geopolitical stability, cooperation among cultures and other things.
O’Connor: I’m a green person. I don’t think we’ll build a Supergrid if we’re talking about moving around fossil fuels. You can transport fossil fuel, but you can’t transport wind or solar. If we’re just talking about fossil fuels, we actually wouldn’t need any new grids, we’d just put the gas into ships, put the oil into ships, put the coal into ships, and drive them to port, and burn the stuff in port. We’re building it because we need to change this world by 2050, and the big driver is global warming and keeping the rise in temperature to 2ºC.
Van Son: It’s a very interesting remark that you make that Supergrid should be built for renewables. Forty years ago there was a dash for nuclear and the idea that we would connect nuclear plants through supergrids. It’s dangerous to link infrastructure to a certain technology or a certain kind of energy production. Energy markets should be facilitated through strong grids, because if grids are weak, they distort markets.
ABB: Who will pay for such projects?
O’Connor: I think those considerations are usually put up by people who don’t want to see any change. What is the alternative? Who knows what the price of carbon’s going to be in five years’ time, and how then are you going to budget for a new fossil fired power station? I prefer to go for something where the capital cost is known and the running cost is cheap. The marginal cost of a wind farm is tiny. It’s low tech, there are no pressures or temperatures in it, and it’s got free fuel.
Van Son: At the end of the day the markets will tell whether something makes sense or not.
O’Connor: Wait a minute! Did the market invent Desertec? The market had nothing to do with Desertec and it has nothing to do with the Supergrid.
Van Son: The markets are now dominated by what we know from the past, which is basically fossil, nuclear and hydro. In those markets, most renewables cannot compete.
O’Connor: Paul, before Mainstream, I built a company in Ireland. I made purely renewable fuel from wind. I added to that purely renewable hydro from Scotland. I sold it at 10 percent cheaper than the biggest power supplier in Ireland. I got no assistance from the government whatsoever. I proved that renewables can exist without support from the state.
Van Son: In your case there was a market; the markets facilitated your renewables. And hydro systems make a lot of money. So renewables are feasible and already economical in some places. Nevertheless, there is a problem with the market in the sense that not all costs are factored into market prices. Prices for energy are, in most cases, much too low and the bill is shifted to the future. CO2 trading, among other things, would bring forward these costs.
ABB: So you want fairer competition between energy types?
O’Connor: Markets don’t work in the energy area. They’re distorted dramatically, they’re distorted by the fact that the fossils don’t pay for the damage they do.
Van Son: The most important fact is that many of the large renewable sources are currently not economically feasible on their own. To overcome this you need government support; there’s no other way.
O’Connor: I completely agree with that.
ABB: If there was one thing you could wish for by 2015 to realize your respective visions, what would that be?
O’Connor: I would like to see the intellectual framework for the Supergrid laid down. I would like to see an agreement across Europe as to who would own the Supergrid, who’d pay for it, the organization that was going to run it, the board of directors, and measures to encourage developers to go and build the first leg of it. And I believe that’s going to happen.
Van Son: I also think that it is now time to talk about reality, to make things work. It is time for a major movement, and for the world to start thinking about the next level of infrastructure for electricity supply.
(The interview with Eddie O'Connor and Paul van Son was published in ABB's Annual Report 2009, which can be found in the News center.)