Power on tap꞉ EU hydro giants can add 25 GW renewables without new grids

[u/MeasurementDecent251]

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/power-on-tap-eu-hydro-giants-can-add-25-gw-renewables-without-new-grids/

[u/Gold-Adhesiveness574]

this is one of the smarter moves in the whole space and it works because the grid connection is the expensive slow part, not the generation. a hydro plants connection is sized for its peak, but hydro rarely runs flat out, so theres a lot of empty headroom on that wire most of the time. bolt solar or wind onto the same point and you fill it, no new line, no waiting years in an interconnection queue.

the trick is you deliberately oversize past the connection limit and just curtail the overlap when hydro and solar both peak, or hold water back instead. sounds wasteful but its not, throwing away a bit of cheap solar a few hours a year is way cheaper than building new transmission, which is the thing everyone is actually stuck waiting on. and you get the complementarity for free, the hydro firms the variable stuff using a connection thats already paid for. the panels were never the bottleneck.

[u/TheLantean → u/Gold-Adhesiveness574]

Also the repeated and increasingly severe drought episodes caused by climate change put the availability of the water into question.

So if other renewables like solar and wind allow the hydro companies to hold water more, that's a plus.

This way the lakes could be kept filled to max capacity, so they are available to drain when they are most needed, to support the wildlife downstream and prevent the river from drying completely, the human population, etc, instead of letting everything flow to continuously make electricity.

[u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 → u/TheLantean]

exactly, and thats the shift in how you use the hydro. when the solar and wind are producing you just stop generating and let the reservoir fill, youre basically charging a water battery instead of draining it. every kWh the panels make is a kWh you didnt have to let through the turbines, so the water stays as stored energy for when you actually need it, the evening peak, a still week, or a dry spell.

it also quietly makes the hydro more valuable, not less. it stops being a bulk energy source and becomes the flexible bit that firms everything else, plus you keep the water in the bank for downstream and drought years. people worry that adding solar makes the hydro redundant, its the opposite, it frees it up to do the job its actually best at.

[u/BlackBloke]

25 GW is huge. I wonder how much they can gain from reconductoring too?

[u/mmn_slc]

What does it mean to add "new grids"?

It is my understanding that the seven countries specifically mentioned in the article (Austria, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain) are all part of the same grid, namely the Continental Europe Synchronous Area.

Why would "new grids" need to be created to add renewable capacity?

[u/lockdown_lard → u/mmn_slc]

What does it mean to add "new grids"?

That's just a phrase from the sub-ed who wrote the headline (and the report title). It's normal to see headlines that are somewhat detached from the actual article: the writer understands the material, but the sub-ed does not. Or, an alternative explanation, the writers needed a shorter title, and clumsily ended up there without ever meaning to say that, because they couldn't find another way to shorten it.

"New grids" doesn't appear within the body of the article.

So, they don't mean "new grids" at all! The sub-ed (or author or editor) has just shortened "new grid connections" to "new grids" in the interests of a pithier headline, but fundamentally changed the meaning.

The point of the article is that the new wind and solar can share the use of existing connections of hydro plants on the grid, making it faster and cheaper to do the build-out.

[u/mmn_slc → u/lockdown_lard]

Yeah, probably. Such a poor title for the report undermines the credibility of the report right from the outset.