ELIA is the Belgian TSO (Transmission System Operator), responsible for the high voltage electricity transmission in Belgium. Although not a producer, when there’s a black-out, ELIA is to blame.
You would therefore think ELIA likes base load electricity production. However…
Ever since the liberalisation of the European electricity market (2009), ELIA is no longer a government component, but acts as an independent profit base. ELIA is currently a public commercial company, but by nature also a monopolist in a Safety-of-Life product market. It also invests in transmission lines abroad.
So, ELIA defined two responsibilities for itself:
1. Be profitable
2. Stabilise the grid (power, frequency and voltage)
Perhaps the order is wrong?
Although independent, at this point in time, ELIA is tightly connected to the government, as they currently and temporarily have a common interest: the so-desired transition to “renewable” electricity production, a.k.a. the sun-and-wind dogma.
As the intermittent solar production and land-based wind turbines are mainly an ever growing issue for the local electricity distribution, it’s the off-shore wind parks that causes both headaches and opportunities for ELIA.
ELIA has a European responsibility inside ENTSO-E to keep the Belgian grid stable, and to maintain the European connections. Consequently, engineers are struggling to keep the grid stable as more “renewables” are injected into the system, and one would think that ELIA is not in favour of adding high-power intermittent production to the grid. The situation will surely not improve by closing the nuclear power plants in the near future.
In contrast, ELIA is currently pushing very extensive investment plans to both extend and enforce the Belgian grid, in an attempt to accomodate “renewables” and avoid black-outs by heavily relying of international connectivity. While international interconnectivity should be a safety feature, it soon will become a supply feature.
CREG, the independent Belgian price monitor organisation, is charged with guarding the monopolist pricing mechanism, as ELIA invests mainly public money while settings its own service price margin. CREG issues warnings about the increasing transmission costs on the electricity bills of consumers, but especially on the bills of energy-dependent industries. However, CREG only has a cost auditing role to play, and cannot interfere with the rationale behind ELIA’s investment strategy.
According to ELIA, the ELIA investment plan is required for two reasons:
1. to accomodate the increasing electricity consumption, caused by the government-pushed shift towards electric cars and towards heating houses with heat pumps instead of natural gas. According to Brigid however, both shifts are wrong decisions, and will prove to fail in the future when scaled up. Instead, cars will run on synthetic fuels and houses will be heated by synthetic methane.
2. to harvest the electricity produced by “renewable” sources in the Belgian North Sea and in Danmark. According to Brigid, these sources are both inefficient, unreliable and down-right unnecessary.
But there is a much more stinging aspect of the ELIA investment strategy, that no-one is currently considering.
As should be clear by now, the energy problem will not be solved by investing in transmission lines and intermittent “renewable” sources, but by investing in large scale base load electricity production sites and synthetic fuel production. Due to the shear size of the production requirements, and the availability requirements, it is also abundantly clear these sites will be nuclear sites.
Moreover, the bulk of the energy distribution will not be electricity, but synthetic fuels. Therefore the increase in electricity demand is overestimated.
However, the ELIA investment plan determines the locations where future nuclear power plants will have to be located. Performing nuclear power plant siting on the basis of an existing power grid designed for “renewables” is not a valid strategy. However, as the grid investment is at least in the same order of magnitude as the plant investment, and it will be already implemented by the time the new power plants will be built, this is what future governments will decide.
Taking into account the amount of surface water the plants will need to produce hydrogen, and the cooling facilities that will be required, the siting is already fixed today by the ELIA investment plan. I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out where the new plants will have to be sited, provided the current ELIA investment plans are accepted.
To summarise, the current ELIA investment strategy is utterly wrong, for 3 reasons:
1. It is overdimensioned. As the goal of ELIA is to maximise transmission profit, within the constraints that are laid out by a government policy for “renewable” electricity production and the battery backup, there is no limit to ELIA’s ambitions. Investment capital (currently vaguely estimated 7.2 billion EUR between 2023 and 2027) will be collected from desperate investment funds facing a 12% inflation and local governments with promises on huge return-on-investment fees and backed up by the entire collection of both regional and federal governments, because it is the highway to the highly desired energy transition. And this without producing a single kWh of electricity.
2. It is expensive, as it focusses on new high-tension lines, including non-trivial novel HVDC technologies and sci-fi “smart grid” ideas, instead of recycling and optimising the existing grid and the existing fuel distribution systems. CREG currently claims the cost is ill computed, and even states the Danish connection has a negative gain projection.
3. It unnecessarily constraints future nuclear power plant siting. Nuclear siting is difficult enough on physics grounds without additional dogmatic constraints.
The better strategy is to adopt the Brigid holistic view on secondary energy production and distribution, including power plant siting, Brigid base load production, and to partner with both Fluxys for synthetic fuel distribution, and with ELIA for electricity distribution and tangible grid stability maintenance.
Take home message: the ELIA investment strategy is incompatible with Brigid.