Large Scale Solar Europe 2024 conference in Lisbon
Since 2023, the main concern facing solar PV project developers in Europe has shifted from supply and module pricing to inadequate grid availability, according to speakers in a number of discussions at the Large Scale Solar Europe 2024 conference in Lisbon this week.
Ending his opening address at the start of the conference, CEO of the Portuguese Renewable Energy Association (APREN), Pedro Amaral Jorge, hammered the point home succinctly: “Grids, grids, grids, grids.”
Panelists picked this up in the next discussion, which focused on the “priorities, pain points and progression for developers” in Europe. Warren Campbell, COO of independent power producer (IPP) Alight, said: “There are all sorts of challenges (for solar developers), but the grid is, for me, the fundamental one.”
He continued: “It’s interesting to remember that there are projects in many countries that are in development. In Italy, in Sweden, there is something like 100 times the amount of requests for grid access as there are actual projects being built each year. So the constraint isn’t that there aren’t developers trying to build projects; it’s more a question of getting projects to fruition.”
Regulation matters
Part of the issue is legislative. Holger Bang, chief investment officer at Nordic Solar, said that the industry needs to see “ambition coming from Brussels; that we see them go all the way in terms of grid, because there are plans for the grid, but they’re always extremely delayed and very untransparent.”
Recent reports from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), and reporting from PV Tech Premium, have shown that grids and transmission infrastructure are a global issue and hold the potential to either spur the energy transition to new heights or to hold it back from where it could be.
Asked about how member states can facilitate the industry to achieve their respective deployment targets, Karen Boesen, CFO at Sonnedix said: “Again, it comes back to the grid. It’s not only about access, it’s about creating an environment of flexibility and about creating regulation.” She said that without regulation companies are investing with uncertainty.
Bang elaborated on the issue: “In quite a few markets we actually see that it’s being imposed on the developers to build out the grid, which was not built out for many years. There needs to be more collaborative effort – civil society needs to have an interest to find out how we get permitted grid connection lines, how we finance it, how we operate it, because it can’t just be the industry on our side.”
Could Italy be a model for Europe?
The Italian grid operator, Terna, recently announced US$18 billion of investmentinto the country’s grid by 2028, with a view to expanding and modernising it to shift from the traditional, centralised system of power plants to the more decentralised model necessitated by widespread use of renewable energy.
This level of investment could transform the system, but in its current state it is far from perfect. Speaking to PV Tech later on at the LSS EU conference, Cristiano Spillati, managing director of Italian renewables developer Limes, said that the approvals process for access to the Italian grid is causing backlogs.
“There is no barrier to entry,” he said of the low cost to apply for a grid connection permit in Italy, which he claimed is around €3,000 (US$3,247.30). “There are many individuals or companies who do only the first two steps; they sign for a piece of land, they get the connection point and, even without accepting it … you have the idea of a project that you can sell for much, much more than you spent on the applications.”
“This is why you have – in solar alone – 140GW of connection requests.”
The topic of Italy’s grid appeared again in the conference’s final panel discussion, which was on “The EU Grid: Investment into Transmission & Distribution Infrastructure”. Pietro Radoia, senior solar analyst at Bloomberg said that “developers’ behaviour has to change … to try not to clog the grid all at the same time.”
He used Italy as an example, where PV deployments are concentrated in the sunnier and more spacious south of the country – particularly in Sicily and Sardinia – whilst the majority of electricity demand is in the north. With this come the physical barriers inherent to shipping power across the length of a country.
