The Dutch Grid in 2050 — Part 2 – CleanTechnica

---

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

---

This is part 2 of some extended thoughts on the Dutch energy grid and where it’s headed. Read part 1 of this discussion first here.

The Dutch Grid in 2050

And now, after a 1500-word introduction, my view on the least improbable Dutch electricity landscape in 2050.

To paraphrase Manuel of Fawlty Towers, “I know nothing … I am a Grumpy Old Man.”

The Dutch are known to be very costs conscious. So, we can start with some acronyms.

• LCOE — Levelized cost of electricity
• LCOS — Levelized cost of storage
• LCOT — Levelized cost of transport
• LCOD — Levelized cost of distribution

These costs are purely theoretical. They are not enhanced with additional costs for the benefit of decision makers that like a single number as reference. In practice, the free-market supply and demand mechanism will determine the price for each product. The customer will see a price that is a combination of the prices of these products plus the retailer’s margin and taxes.

Predicting is hard, ask any weather man or woman. A few months to a few years is sometimes possible, depending on the topic. A 10-year budget extrapolation, as some countries like to do, is nonsense. There will be too many changes in policy and economic ups and downs. Predicting 25 years into the future, with a fast-changing technological environment, is completely impossible.

This gives me the freedom to give my fantasy free rein. That would result in a highly unlikely future, not the least improbable. So, I will not write science fiction — there will be no large satellites in Earth orbit collecting solar energy and beaming it down to Earth. The ITER fusion nuclear reactor will still be 30 years in the future, like it has been for the past 40 years. We have no shafts into the Earth’s magma core tapping its energy and don’t have numerous other hoped for or expected inventions.

We have just normal, predictable developments of current day technology, misusing Moore’s Law type of developments extrapolated to a 25-year period. (Moore’s Law has always been only valid for the next 10 years, because then it would hit the wall of existing scientific knowledge. Luckily, scientists kept pushing that wall at the same speed as Moore’s Law was using newer science.) In this case, we are talking specifically about battery development. They have been getting better, cheaper, more dense, etc. at a regular pace. My basic guess is that in 25 years, using batteries is a no-brainer for many applications.

To make this exercise more concrete, we will likely see final energy demand of about 450 TWh per year in 2050. In theory, satisfying this demand can be done using primary energy of over 2,000 TWh of fossil fuels, over 1,000 TWh of hydrogen, or nearly 500 TWh of electricity from sun, wind, and water. (No mention of the energy needed to produce the hydrogen!)

There will be 5 million prosumer households with solar PV and a home battery. Another 20,000 farmers, many with a wind turbine beside a lot of PV panels on their buildings and serious batteries to secure their business, are also prosumers. How many of the factories, office buildings, and parking facilities will be eager to put some extra power into the grid? Your guess is as good as mine. This is besides commercial New Age power plants collecting energy from solar and wind supported by battery farms.

The Invisible Hand In A Free But Well Regulated Market

First power to move the future.

A current development that I expect to influence the future is the occurrence of many new companies that provide part of the functions previously provided by utilities. The first private cross-border HVDC lines are being built. We can see the start of energy cooperations in industrial zones and housing complexes that can evolve into microgrids. The same type of cooperation, but not location bound, is coming from virtual (micro-)grids or virtual power plants. With an open and free market, we are no longer constrained by the risk-averse and slow-moving bureaucracies of large monopolistic utilities. We will see thousands of startups, and hundreds will succeed.

First consequence

The architecture of the grid must evolve from a hierarchical one with half a dozen big power plants connected to a >100kV transport grid and 65kV main distribution grid. The new architecture needs a horizontal, web-like grid with hundreds of main solar, wind, and battery power plants and many million prosumers. This is a major conceptual shift. It requires new, out-of-the-box thinking about the functioning of the electric grid. Besides large changes to the physical grid, it requires a complete new management and control structure.

Electrify Everything

Second power to move the future.

I bet on an electrifying everything scenario. The advantages are bigger than the business-as-usual scenario which replaces current fossil-based energy sources with synthetic replacements based on hydrogen and carbon captured. The EU is forcing development into the direction of a free market. Other countries and regions can be captivated by the oil and gas industry in league with the power utilities, resulting in a more business-as-usual infrastructure. Those places will experience an easier transition but will have a less competitive economy (looking at you, Japan — hydrogen is very expensive).

In the electrify everything scenario, the end users of energy must replace all fossil fuel appliances, in homes and in factories, with electric ones that can supply the same functionality or results. For homes, it is replacing stoves and boilers with heat pumps. There is a lot of resistance against this, because it is accompanied with advice, formulated as a prerequisite, to install floor heating and better insulate the house. This is too much of a renovation for most people to be acceptable. It is never mentioned that the same solution they have now, just install more heating capacity and waste more energy, will still be possible. Telling people what you think is good for them is not always helping.

Industry has a more difficult transition to make if it uses fossil fuel-based heat, or redox processing. But electricity can produce heat of any temperature and most redox processing can be done using locally produced green hydrogen.

Second consequence

The grid must double, perhaps triple, its capacity. And it should be able to transport the electricity from everywhere to everywhere. No need for an expensive alternative hydrogen pipe network.

Batteries

Third power to move the future.

In the past, the grid was designed with the knowledge that it was impossible to store electricity. This country is too flat to have any hydropower. Baseload power produced a bit more than was demanded and used the over production to heat the rivers or produce clouds. For peak demand, there were special peaker power plants, but even the best had some lag time between the signal they were needed and providing electricity.

This changed with the advance of batteries to support and stabilize the grid. They can react in real time on fluctuations in milliseconds, far faster than the minutes some peaker plants took to start putting power into the grid. Commercial battery parks are treated as virtual power plants by the grid operators. There are just too many being built by opportunistic entrepreneurs for the grid operators to be happy. The Levelized Cost Of Storage (LCOS) is coming down fast with cheaper battery cells and better designs for stationary storage systems. This is completely altering the way we think about fallback storage (UPS) and longer time storage.

A large part of the electricity the grid delivers to consumers (both private and commercial) is not for direct use anymore. It is for charging the 10 million batteries in passenger cars, 2 million batteries in commercial vehicles, 5 million batteries behind the meter, batteries to balance the power consumption of commercial buildings and factories, and commercial battery electric storage systems (BESS) power-plants. At least 3 million homes have a driveway. About 4 million BEVs will call those driveways home. A million curbside chargers support V2G. Some 1–4 million private cars, depending on the time of day, and 5 million private behind-the-meter batteries can also supply power to stabilize the grid or supplement the wind and solar when there is a temporary shortage. This is 120 TWh to 180 TWh emergency capacity. What commercial behind-the-meter power and BESS can provide is a lot more.

The time of trucking diesel generators into neighborhoods in case of a blackout is over. There is always enough emergency battery power locally available.

The combination of private storage and commercial storage should be enough to cover at least one and often two days of no wind and no sun.

Last but not least, I said I would not write about fantastic future developments, but I am making one exception. Flow batteries have been in development for many years. The costs (LCOS) are going down steadily. But the LCOS of lithium and natrium batteries are going down faster. The big advantage of flow batteries is their gigantic storage capacity. In theory, they can store the energy to bridge the lack of generation of a sunless or windless season.

Third consequence

All grid connections must become two-way connections. Every consumer can turn into a producer in milliseconds. The grid must communicate with all those clients, and the retail companies that manage them, to keep it all balanced. This is a very big change from the way it is functioning now.

Cheap solar and wind

Fourth power to move the future.

The LCOE for solar and wind is very low at the moment. It will get a bit lower by 2050, but not much. About half of the energy consumption of the 9 million households will be covered by their own solar PV panels. The LCOE of rooftop solar is higher than commercial solar, but still cheaper for the consumer without the additional costs than electricity provided over the grid, especially in combination with a behind-the-meter battery.

The low costs of building solar and wind generation make it easy to overbuild and have a lot of redundancy. The LCOE of a solar farm in Norway will have a very different LCOE than the same solar farm build on the equator. The complaint about intermittency is not sustainable. The intermittency is calculated in the LCOE.

In the Netherlands, it is mostly either windy or sunny, sometimes both, seldom neither. That makes solar and wind very complementary to each other. We need about 1.5 TWh per day in summer, and in winter a bit more, because of heating and cooling our living spaces. On the save side, we need 2 TWh per day in solar capacity and 2 TWh per day in wind capacity. This must be supported by enough storage to bridge the differences between time of production and time of consumption. When the storage is behind the meter, the cost is not counted in energy costs, like those of private PV panels is also outside the public domain.

Because expanding the capacity in thousands of small increments is easy, there are no large capex risks in building capacity. The invisible hand (you know, my big and trusted friend to solve many problems) will halt expansion when the ROI becomes too low and restart expansion when it becomes profitable again. No drama, no heated debates in Parliament about the many billion dollars of investment needed for the next power plant, just the market automatically rightsizing the capacity.

Fourth consequence

While energy independence and not being dependent on a single source or two sources of energy is important, who will invest in significantly more expensive alternatives? How to mitigate the risks of the “Dunkelflaute,” the long period of no wind and no sun that is too expensive to do locally for the Netherlands? Countries with large temporary or seasonal imbalance in their renewable energy resources need the fallback that an EU-wide energy system offers.

Enlargement of the infrastructure to European size

Fifth power to move the future.

In the first article in “Something specific about the EU,” the logic for a single EU+ energy authority was explained. That single authority is needed to plan supranational energy infrastructure, like the wind park on the Dogger Bank in the central part of the North Sea. The many HVDC lines needed to connect the different parts of the EU energy system across the continent are another example. Rules for making the EU+ a single energy market and enforcing those rules will also be a duty of that organization. France and other countries will not like it, but national energy resources — like France’s fleet of nuclear power plants, hydro plants in the mountainous regions, and the large solar farms close to the Mediterranean — will become European resources. National interests claiming priority are justified, but coordination and protection of the interest of the whole union is an EU task.

As discussed above, the EU needs Ukraine, not only for its safety and because it will be a great contribution to the Union, but also simply because the solar and wind on the Ukrainian plains are a welcome addition to the different climates of the EU.

The United Kingdom and Norway can stay outside the EU, as long as they become a member of the energy union. The North Sea is important for North-Western Europe, the management of all the activities on the North Sea is now organized in a number of treaties. The EU should represent the member states that are now party to those treaties for the energy union.

Fifth consequence

Ukraine and Moldova need to be made into EU members as soon as possible. A lot of EU civil servants need to be appointed to plan meetings and write omnibuses (thick stacks of paper combining many proposals or regulations). With luck and a lot of patience, after a few years, some decisions will be made.

We will take a break now and then return in part 3 for my conclusions on the Dutch grid in 2050.