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Ukraine’s electricity supply “is improving”
Ukraine Electricity infrastructure Speaking on Ukrainian television on 30 November Ukraine’s Energy minister Herman Halushchenko has said that his country’s energy situation “is improving every day” and added that without any more waves of air strikes “in the short term we will be able to stabilise and reduce the duration of the outage.”
He said that while there would still be outages, the aim was to make them as planned as possible.
Mr Halushchenko also outlined his vision for the future of the Ukrainian grid. “We do not want to restore the system as it was before. We will make it modern,” he said. He spoke of two paths for Ukraine’s energy infrastructure,
short term and long term. The short-term aim was to restore as much as possible quickly, but in the long term, the entire grid would have a completely different look.
Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s state-run energy operator, reported that the country’s power system deficit stood at 27%, but that capacity is gradually increasing.
The update, on Facebook, added that there are now consumptions limits for each region and that exceeding the consumption limits ‘leads to the need for emergency outages to avoid grid overload and ensure balance in the power system.’ Ukrenergo urged Ukrainians to continue limiting their electricity consumption so that engineers can focus on repairs. Meanwhile shelling and missile attacks on
Kherson and the surrounding area, including the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, have been stepped up. US president Biden has described the attacks on civilian areas as ‘barbaric’ and the European Commission has responded by unveiling plans on 30 November for setting up a specialised court, backed by the United Nations, to investigate and prosecute possible war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought death, devastation and unspeakable suffering,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in an official statement. “Russia must pay for its horrific crimes, including for its crime of aggression against a sovereign state.”
990 MW floating offshore wind farm off Spain Spain Wind power
IberBlue Wind, a joint venture set up to develop floating offshore wind farms on the Iberian Peninsula, has chosen the waters off Andalusia to develop the first of its offshore wind projects. The wind farm, named Nao Victoria, will occupy an area of 310 km2 in the Alboran Sea (the westernmost part of the Mediterranean Sea). It will be located off the coasts of Cadiz and Malaga and will have 55 floating offshore wind turbines and an installed capacity of 990 MW. The implementation of this project will require close collaboration with the nearby ports of Cadiz and Malaga and will play an important role in employment generation, as it will allow the creation of thousands of jobs,
during construction and then operation. IberBlue Wind has already sent the Initial Project Document (IPD), which includes its technical characteristics, to the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), and initiated contacts with regional and local institutions, to provide the project with maximum transparency and integration in the territory.
The Nao Victoria offshore wind farm will be located 25-40 km from the coast, which will reduce the impact of the installation, which will be supported by floating platforms anchored to the seabed. This technology allows the wind turbines to be located deeper in the sea, to overcome the difficulty posed by the narrow continental shelf of the Iberian Peninsula.
The joint venture is made up of the Irish company Simply Blue Group, a developer with extensive experience in the blue economy, specifically in floating offshore wind turbines, and the Spanish companies Proes Consultores, the engineering division of the Amper Group, and FF NEV, a leader in the development and promotion of renewable projects on the peninsula. Nao Victoria is named after a vessel of the Magellan-Elcano expedition that completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth in the 16th century. In addition to Andalusia, IberBlue Wind is working on the development of other projects in Galicia and Portugal, another strategic area for the consortium.
Geothermal to be re-launched in Germany
Germany Geothermal energy Online news agency Clean Energy Wire reports that a new exploration process launched by Germany’s economy and climate ministry (BMWK) aims to better exploit a renewable energy source, geothermal energy, whose great potential for heating has so far been under-utilised. The ministry aims to consult policymakers, industry groups and other stakeholders in potential geothermal energy generation regions to unlock this energy source that Economy and Climate minister Robert Habeck says “is reliably available throughout the whole year, does not depend
on the weather, is crisis-proof and almost non-depletable.”
His ministry has therefore developed a first concept including several concrete measures to improve geothermal heating use. “Using geothermal energy has to be thought of consistently with the expansion and decarbonisation of our heating grids,” Habeck argued, which are intended to contain 50 % climate-neutral heating energy by 2030. Habeck announced at the beginning of his term last year that the government aimed to exploit up to 10 TWh of geothermal energy by the end of the decade, which should be
achieved by opening at least 100 new projects in the next years.
Deep geothermal energy can make a major contribution to the decarbonisation of Germany’s heating sector, a study published earlier this year found. It could cover more than a quarter of Germany’s annual heat demand(over 300 TWh) and generate additional revenue and jobs. The technology has been used for decades in many European cities, such as Paris and Munich, but has not yet received much attention elsewhere in Germany’s heating sector transition, where oil and gas still dominate.
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