A Vision for Creating a More Powerful Europe

Airtricity is proposing the development of the Supergrid. This project consists of a series of interconnected offshore wind farms throughout the seas of Europe. It would be commonly owned by all European states, with the wind farms dispersed across a wide geographic area, ranging from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and Atlantic. This broad arrangement could smooth out any intermittency of supply by capturing the wind and transmitting power from one end of the grid to the other to feed into national grids. In the event of the wind not blowing, it would also allow for the movement of brown (non-renewable) power, putting in place an infrastructure for an energy trading system. Supergrid would be implemented in stages, the first being an offshore wind farm in the North Sea called the 10GW Foundation Project. It would demonstrate the project’s feasibility by interconnecting the markets of the UK, the Netherlands and Germany and create economies of scale.

By Dr Eddie O’Connor, CEO and founder of Airtricity, Ireland