Future generation

How to adapt the power grid to the challenges of distributed generation and fluctuating inputs from renewable sources? Professor Lou van der Sluis presented his new book on smartgrid research last Tuesday.

“The research programme is a contribution to solving the problems we identified eight years ago,” Van der Sluis says. “Moreover, the added value is that researchers from different universities and research institutes, like ECN and Kema, have grown into a research community.”

The problems that Van der Sluis refers to are technical as well as economic. In the 1990s, the heavy electro-technical industry left the Netherlands in search of cheaper labour. Dr Lout Jonkers, from the Netherlands’ Ministry of Science and Education, assembled electrical power experts to think of new missions that could spawn innovation and new industrial activities. The group – called EMVT (electro magnetic power technology) – targeted technologies that could transform and transport electrical energy in the right form at the right time. Eventually, 18 million euros was assigned to the innovation research programme (IOP-EMVT). This allowed ten PhD students to write their theses on the transformation of the current hierarchical grid to the future flat grid characterised by distributed generation and an archipelago-like structure of connected semi-self-sufficient local power networks.

“The development of smartgrids works in two ways,” Van der Sluis explains. “One is the distributed small-scale generation; the other is integration on a European level. Take for example the influx from large offshore wind parks. Both Dr Georgios Papaefthymiou and Dr Jody Verboomen have developed frontier insights on the international exchange of renewable power.”

Another main conclusion from the report is that the future power grid can no longer be regarded as a linear system. “This means that for its control, security and protection, we need different tools. We can’t achieve that without the help of our colleagues from the information and communication technologies.”

Professor Lou van der Sluis, ‘Opgewekt door de buurt / Future Generation’, 68 pages, TU Delft Library, 2011. Available in Dutch and English by request at geertwessel.boltje@agentschapnl.nl