
A lack of available grid capacity is a well-documented challenge for Europe’s energy transition in general, and its solar sector in particular. Figures published last year by think tank Ember, for instance, expect European grids in 19 countries to lack over 200GW of available capacity for solar projects alone by the end of the decade.
This problem is particularly significant in Eastern Europe, and was a key topic of conversation both on-stage and in meeting rooms at last year’s Large Scale Solar Central Eastern Europe event, organised by Solar Media and held in Warsaw. Andres Meesak, innovation and business development lead at Estonian distribution system operator (DSO) Viru Elektrivõrgud, who was present at the event, tells PV Tech Premium that the legacy of the Soviet Union has cast a long shadow over Eastern Europe’s power grids.
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“The legacy of the socialist time is different, from the constant development of old economies like the Central and Western European countries,” says Meesak. “You can’t compare the grid development in Austria and Poland, or the Baltic countries.
“It was a very centralised system, and all the grid planning was, so to say, driven by the economic interests of the central government,” Meesak continues, pointing to north-east Estonia, an area with a strong mining industry where the grid was designed in such a way as to best support that particular sector. “The countries were extremely poor – there was no money – and all the investments didn’t go to developing the grid, but maintaining the grid as it was.”
New investment and new ways of thinking
Another feature of Eastern Europe’s grids is that many assets are state-owned. Meesak points out that while EU regulations prevent a single company or organisation from owning both generation and distribution systems, which minimises the impacts of this phenomenon, the vast majority of Estonia’s grid assets, for instance, are state-owned, which has dissuaded significant private investment in the sector.
“The financing models of the grid are different in different parts of Europe,” says Meesak. “In the 1990s, after regaining independence from the Soviet Union, all the grid assets were state-owned. In Estonia’s case, they still are; just 5% of the grid in Estonia is privately owned, the rest of the assets are state-owned energy companies’, and at least in the Baltic countries, the main energy generating and distributing assets are, and were, state-owned.”
“If no additional measures are taken, the challenges will get worse,” agrees Robin Hirschl, another speaker at last year’s Warsaw event, and the CEO of PV-Invest, who argues that the rapidly-changing nature of Eastern Europe’s energy mix necessitates more investment. “We are heading towards more fluctuating generation on the grid, this is renewables – wind and solar – that are, to some extent a bit difficult to predict; and on the other hand, to increase the challenges we are taking out baseload capacity.”
This is also reflected in figures from market analyst Aurora, published this week, which show that, between 2022 and 2023, there was a 14.45% year-on-year increase in “remedial actions” taken across Europe’s grids to manage load, including curtailment. This figure includes both renewable and non-renewable assets, highlighting that Europe’s grid is, to an extent, unsuitable to manage the continent’s current energy mix, let alone the more renewable power-dominated mix that many expect to come.
“My opinion is that we need to change, a little bit, the way we are thinking about the dimensioning and the requirement for infrastructure,” says Hirschl, suggesting that new financial support needs to be delivered alongside new ways of thinking.
“What we need to do, and where the investment should go, is to make the end points on the grids, the generators as well as the consumers, a bit more flexible where we can,” Hirschl continues. “I’m coming from the generators’ side as an investor in PV, and we still make our business plans with the assumption that our plans will run 100% of the time that they can potentially run, and we need to get away from that.”
A more ‘intelligent’ grid
At the Warsaw event, Hirschl called for Eastern Europe to deploy a more “intelligent” grid, which he repeated in a private conversation. When asked what this would look like in practice, he said that it would be an energy system in which more devices are in communication with each other, and can manage power supply and demand independently to meet energy needs.
“An intelligent grid is [one] where all generators, as well as consumers, talk to each other, and can adapt to the local needs of the grid,” Hirschl explains. “Everybody, even the small consumers, can put some flexibility to the overall grid system. When I want my dishwasher to run I could, actually, just switch it on in the morning, and say I want it to be done by 5pm when I come home from the office, and then I let the system decide when the dishwasher works; it’s a stupid example but you know what I mean!”
Hirschl is not alone in this idea. In 2023, Utilidata COO Jess Melanson told PV Tech Premium that “distributed AI” could be a cornerstone of the US’ energy grid in the future, and a number of investments in smart grid technology have since been made in the US. These include a US$70 million investment from the Department of Energy to “strengthen smart grid resilience” in the Arizona Public Service Company, and this kind of investment highlights how Eastern Europe is only just starting to establish a “modern understanding” of grid function, according to Meesak.
“The grid was very heavily single-directional, from the large fossil fuel power plants to the consumers,” says Meesak. “And then with the appearance of the first wind parks in the mid-2000s, it appeared that, where the wind parks were, there was no grid, and that started the planning and development of the grid in let’s say a ‘modern understanding’ to evolve the distributed generation.”
Hirschl notes that the technology for this more intelligent grid system certainly exists, but that there is a greater “psychological” challenge in implementing these devices.
“I think it’s more of a psychological challenge than a technical challenge,” Hirschl says. “The technical solutions are there, and there are various ways of how these end points can communicate with each other. Even in my little world there are so many people who are afraid of smart meters, because they feel controlled and they don’t want to share so much information about ourselves.”
The role of storage
At the Warsaw event, perhaps the single most-discussed technology to help deliver these more modern and intelligent grids was storage. Not only would this improve the resiliency of Eastern Europe’s grids, and add flexibility to the system, but Meesak notes that the installation of battery energy storage systems (BESS) could minimise the need for expensive and time-consuming grid asset construction.
“If we have the storage close to consumption, this might mean that we don’t need, in certain cases, to build additional grid capacity to satisfy the peak loads,” says Messak, pointing to the investment case for storage. “With local storage, we might avoid rebuilding the grid; we see storage to be an essential part of the grid, and this is not one of those ‘neat and sexy’ things but, on the contrary, something that might benefit the whole society, of keeping the grid investments from skyrocketing.”
This is particularly significant considering the cost of installing new grid infrastructure, with industry lobby group European Round Table for Industry (ERT) suggesting that upgrading Europe’s grid infrastructure could cost €800 billion (US$870 billion) by the end of the decade.
Hirschl goes further, suggesting that the effective integration of storage into an energy grid in need of technological modernisation could be an opportunity to invest in newer battery technologies, and systems designed to deliver power over a longer period.
“We probably need to go beyond [what exists now],” Hirschl says. “When we talk about storage today we typically think, or at least I think, of these batteries that are 1-hour, 2-hour or 4-hour storage, for relatively quick reserves and frequency stabilisation.
“Probably going forward we need to think [about] longer [times], storage over a week or a month,” Hirschl continues, using the example of pumped hydro storage systems in Australia as a kind of technology that could be “more than just the chemical batteries that we’re talking about today” in Europe.
Ultimately, Meesuk concludes that a more electrified world will need a more comprehensive, and more intelligent, grid system, that uses a greater range of technologies and better incorporates flexibility into its core design.
“What we see is that all of our lives are more and more electrified,” says Meesuk. “The heating system is electrified through heat pumps, the transport sector is electrified to reduce the carbon footprint and with electrification, there might be a need to completely rebuild the grid to add the capacity for the peak loads.”
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