The coming blackout

On Monday, 17th December 2007, Europe narrowly avoided disaster. A cold snap had lowered the temperature across much of continent to several degrees below average and that evening, as households across the continent switched on their heating systems, the power consumption hit critical levels.

France, Italy and Spain all set new records for power consumption. By sheer luck, Switzerland and Germany, which were less cold, were able to provide some 1.6 GWe of spare capacity to cover the cracks in the system.

As it turned out, the rest of the winter was abnormally mild. But had the cold snap been more widespread, the European electricity supply could have collapsed.

The problem dates from about 30 years ago when Europe’s grid system and generating capacity was built with a huge amount of spare capacity. Since then, as economies have boomed, politicians have had little incentive to upgrade the system. In the meantime, consumption has been increasing at the rate of 1-2 per cent per year and today the spare capacity has all but gone. With the simplest extrapolation being that demand will continue to grow at the same rate, a crisis looms.

Now the Union for the Co-ordination of Transmission of Electricity, an association of power providers in Europe has issued a report detailing the system’s shortcomings. And analysis on the arXiv by Michael Dittmar at the Swiss Federal Institue of Technology in Zurich paints an even gloomier picture, not least because there is no clear short term path to reducing consumption or increasing generating capacity.

Europe has suffered a number of large blackouts in recent years, notably in Italy between 28-29th September 2003 and in France and Germany on 4 November 2006. But worse looks to be on the cards. Dittmar’s message is that the next winter of 2008/9 will test the European grid to its limits.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0803.4421: The European Electricity Grid System and Winter Peak Load Stress