For example;

Not so long ago I was assigned to the construction of a gas turbine power generation project in the centre of Burma on the road to Mandalay. The need for the power was that an adjacent industrial plant was for ever having its power supply interupted. Restart took several days and no sooner was it up and running the power supply was lost again. Its electrical power came from hydro plant located some two hundred or so miles away in the East of the country. In spite of the military presence dissidents enjoyed themselves and took great staisfaction in disrutpting power supplies by blowing up the electricity pylons. This was such a regular occurence that the output of the plant was severely disrupted.

Denis Stephens

Just an addition to Dave’s potted history.  The concept of the national grid was in technical papers by Alexander Kennedy a partner in Kennedy and Donkin, a partnership of consulting engineers which started with a reciprocating steam engines circa 1890 in Belfast.  They became part of an American owned consulting engineers about a decade ago. The concept was a 132kV network linking the various power companies/ municipalities.

Some of the old generating plant was pretty inefficient and unreliable e.g Kingston on Thames owned a station which was 16% efficient on a good day. In the 1930s someone a few miles away with a set of Mr Parsons new steam turbines was probably about 26-28% efficient so in the poorer towns or those who voted not to spend, buying power looked good compared with buying coal. Interconnection was sometimes only to avoid buying the 5th or 6th set needed to give the reliability a large town expected. In the North East, another firm of consultants Merz and McLellan predated the national grid with a 66kV regional scheme.  They have now been swallowed by the same US firm. In the 1960s growth made it necessary to overlay the 132kV with a 275kV network. However politics came into play with Harold Wilson’s rush for growth so we ended up with a lot of 400kV capacity. We didn’t seriously need such a high voltage.  Now,some 40 years later we can use it. Increments  in technology have allowed a lot of capacity to be added in increments. Better conductors slung on the same towers can add a quarter, solid state voltage regulation can do about the same. I think we are now knocking up against the limits of that approach. I suspect that a 500kV or 600kV dc overlay would be a pretty good national policy.  Modern underground or marine dc cables look good.  However don’t expect hardly any of the technology to be  from the UK.  We can do the low tech work and use other peoples products but not much else for the simple reason so few of us want to be power engineers.
That goes for most generation as well. We do have pretty good power company operators but then so do many other third world countries. Can anyone add a happy ending?

Cheers
Bernard Quigg 

I do not see the problem with Europe organising such a grid.

There is already a trans european group dealing with international grids – UTCE.

They could give the problem to a large consulting group – Mott Macdonald say who design this sort of thing, and they would repeat Czisch’s calculation to establish the position of the inter connectors.

Europe would then merely instruct the members states to a) undertake the lengthy planning that’s has been gone through for each line, which typically takes 7 years and then to let tenders to build them to the free market.

Once built they can be sold off to the private sector to operate.

Not much different to the central planning which has gone on for years for the various highways, and tunnels connecting various European countries.

Whilst these things may happen at different speeds, it is essential that planning for the grid takes place now, since it is the longest lead time item. It is the failure to do this in the UK which is, as I write, holding back wind energy in UK – eg nothing more can be built in Scotland until the connection is beefed up.

Gary Bloke.

I would also like to point out that it just deals with electricity- although of course that could be seen as taking care of a lot of transport energy needs ( with plug in cars etc). On the all important heat side, good building design/energy efficiency can help a lot to cut demand and then there are all the heat supply options we have been talking about- domestic solar collectors and heat stores, biomass CHP large and (possibly) small, biogas from AD possibly feeding to fuel cells etc etc. If we really must ( I worry about open cast mining) there is also the idea of using gassification of coal with CCS, to provide hydrogen for local CHP. And I guess some of the electricity could be used for heat- e.g in heat pumps

So its a mixed system at various levels, probably being developed at uneven speeds.

Dave Elliott

This is why the utilities are against it – they exist to sell power, and they would sell less, with a Europe wide grid, because many of their power stations would become redundant, and the stations which were left would be more efficient.
So the priority is to come up with a coherent plan for both renewables, conservation and the grid and get on with it. This should technology be paid for with the government printing the money, rather than giving it to the bunch of wasters in the city who have wrecked the world economy on complicated fantasy money schemes, and destroyed our manufacturing.

Kind regards

Dave Andrews