Given the EU's push for renewables, what is the readiness of the European grid for renewable power?

The new Repower EU plan is considering a significant acceleration of renewable distribution in response to the European energy crisis, which is the most obvious short-term measure to mitigate the significant fossil energy cost increase in wholesale markets as well as the low availability of the French nuclear portfolio.

• While grids have so far not been major roadblocks to renewable integration, we should anticipate they will become bottlenecks – we are starting to see this in Holland. So, it is essential to evolve our electricity market design to provide more transparency on grid bottlenecks and clear indications to investors on the areas where it is the easiest and most economical to enable renewable investments.
   
• In congested areas it is also key to consider alternative non-firm grid connection options, for example, incentivizing renewable investment with storage capabilities to offset congestion during certain periods of the day. This is useful both at high voltage (for large-scale renewable farms) as well as low voltage levels (for rooftop PV).
   
• While rooftop PV is appealing as it minimizes the land impact, the bundling of PV with storage self-consumptions schemes as well as dynamic export tariffs is essential to ensure successful renewable injections during periods when grids can absorb excess renewable self-consumption.
   

What more needs to be done and can it be done in time to meet the RePowerEU targets?

• Revisiting the energy market design will provide incentives to consumers that best align their flexible consumption with available renewable energy. It will also minimize usage of very expensive fuels during peak conditions.
   
• Options include the implementation of the Clean Energy package, the development of a new flexibility code to further automate the dynamic participation of flexible consumers into intraday, and a balancing of markets to capture renewables when they are available.
   
• Such participation is today only happening at the industrial level or for large building loads, so we must focus our efforts on expanding this concept to enroll all flexibilities arising from new heat pumps, EV smart charging – including bidirectional charging – and home battery storage, which currently is self-financed with home rooftop PV under self-consumption.
   
• Latest IEA reports indicate that grids will require four times more flexibility between now and 2050, as a result of such fast renewable expansion which needs to capture every flexibility throughout the system to make demand more elastic in the market mechanism, as well as to offset grid congestions when they happen.
   

What is Europe planning to accelerate renewables developments?

• The EU is particularly focusing on rooftop PV integration as these are renewables that are the easiest to integrate into the electricity system and require less complex permitting (as they do not have any direct impact on extra land permitting. The new EU solar energy strategy targeting to double the current installed capacity by 2025 (320GW extra capacity) and quadruple it by 2030. This initiative is expected to be supported by a dedicated new solar rooftop initiative mandating solar in all new buildings within 2025-2030 combined with storage and smarter tariffs as well as the continued development of citizen energy communities. This new plan is expected to be considered through the next European Energy Performance Building Directive. This directive will define new energy efficiency labeling and mandating trajectories to shift the European building stocks towards net zero building between now and 2050 (through incentives to support integrated building upgrades combining PV, heat pumps as well as EV charging together with home & building energy management).
   
• The current European residential building portfolio is composed of around 80M single family homes, 10% of them being today equipped with PV under feed-in tariff. As a result of these several incentives, we expect the solar install base to at least quadruple over this building portfolio within 2030 representing a portfolio of 32-40M building to be equipped with solar and storage within 2030. In the same time analysis of European EV deployments (see the Eurelectric reference report) highlights a likely deployment of 30M charging points through residential homes which largely intersect with this solar & storage market and will lead to the possibility to have larger installations (expanding typically from 4kw household towards 8kw). The rapid switch to self-consumption business models brings new opportunities of differentiation for integrated solar, storage and smart charging.
   

How much investment do you estimate could be needed to make the grid renewable ready?

• Several analyses have been made by Eurelectric, as well as ENTSO-E based on the Ten-Year Network development plan scenarios. I would suggest referring to their latest report.
   
• Beyond investments in physical reinforcement on critical corridors, it is also necessary to establish new flexibility marketplaces to make sure such investments are optimized versus the flexibility that the demand side will progressively be able to provide.
   
• As a concrete example, a recent study by Imperial College London has highlighted that enabling flexibility services through Vehicle to Grid (V2G) bidirectional charging would save up to 412-882 million GBP in energy system costs (deferral of backup generation capacity, deferral in distribution network reinforcement, as well as reduction in renewable curtailments during low loads periods) for only 50,000 contributing electric vehicles (EVs).

What is the expected impact on consumers?

• The current energy crisis is accelerating EV and PV adoption at a residential scale, which is opening new flexibility options at the edge of the energy system as well as new home energy optimization strategies protecting users against rising home electricity prices. Regulators are working on new regimes to facilitate residential flexibility participation in energy markets, resetting the historical demand response approaches which so far, has not worked fairly for residential low voltage environments. As an example, the UK regulator Ofgem has designed a new regulation allowing to leverage submetering data to remunerate smart charging flexibility more accurately into real-time markets, potentially opening up for new innovative tariffs combining flat and dynamic tariffs behind the meter depending on flexibility of associated resources. A real flexibility revolution moving forward!
   
• Today's new edge IoT technolgies are capable of directly self-optimizing into dynamic prices – whether for flexibility or energy – which allows EV charges during home PV peaks or through the hours of the week where the electricity is really the cheapest. These technologies are expanding to incorporate Appstore marketplaces enabling consumers to select their preferred flexibility options from commercial aggregators, retailers and utilities.
   
• New integration strategies are investigated at the home level through direct DC integration across PV, EV charging as well as home batteries which significantly increase the storage roundtrip efficiency typically moving from less than 80% round trip efficiency through AC into efficiencies higher than 90% with DC. EVs are progressively migrating to bidirectional charging – which we expect will become a default option by 2025 as per most EV OEM feedback – which ultimately will allow minimizing the investment required for home standalone storage using the EV battery to optimize self-consumption through days and nights while enabling new real-time energy transactions with the grid. Bidirectional chargers will progressively become default options of Home solar inverters, overall reducing the cost of netzero home electrical installations.
   
• At current power prices, local home PV installations are becoming business as usual where an 8Kw solar installation can be returned in less than five years, covering over 60% of the energy needs of a typical netzero home equipped with EV and bidirectional charging. Such installation will be able to self-consume around 70% of the solar PV produced on their roof while the surplus will be stored to be transacted with the grid at best times through grid morning or evening peaks which ultimately will maximise export revenues from 10c/Kwh into 50-70c/Kwh as currently observed in wholesale markets.
   
• At the heart of future netzero homes is the potential for greater control and user interactions. Users get a better grasp on cost, but also, sustainability. For those concerned about their carbon footprint, there is the option to utilize grid energy when it is generated by via renewable sources. Homes will progressively be equipped with new-generation home economic dispatch optimization to make all associated controls seamless, live and automated while providing simple metrics and data proving associated environmental and economic benefits.