Spain needs electric cars, links for wind boom

A view of electric wind power plants in Maranchon, near Guadalajara, Spain May 18, 2006. The Spanish government should assign no free carbon dioxide emission rights to the electricity industry to force it to clean up, Spain's number two power company Iberdrola said on Thursday. Iberdrola would stand to gain more than its bigger rival Endesa if the power industry had no free rights because a bigger proportion of its electricity comes from hydroelectric and other renewable sources than Endesa's. Picture taken on May 18, 2006.

LONDON (Reuters) - Spain needs electric cars and a lot more power links with France to better deal with big swings in wind output and spread the benefits of its clean energy boom across Europe, the head of Spanish grid operator Red Electrica said on Monday.

Spain's 18,700 megawatts of installed wind turbines have supplied more than half of its demand at times this winter, forcing Red Electrica to stop some turbines to keep system stability because a dearth of grid connections prevented the green energy from reaching the rest of Europe.

"The bottleneck is the French network but it's really about being connected to the whole European system," Red Electrica president Luis Atienza told Reuters in an interview.

"The bigger the system the more stable it is and the greater the capacity to compensate for the variability of any of its component parts."

Red Electrica and its French counterpart RTE have agreed to build from early next year the first new grid connection between France and Spain in nearly three decades, doubling the existing transmission capacity.

But it will still be nowhere near enough to efficiently manage the swings in wind power output Red Electrica has to cope with already, with the record of 54 percent of demand met by wind in early November almost 13,000 MW higher than output on calm days when the same turbines have contributed just 1 percent.

"It's a step forward but it's still a very modest step because our level of interconnection in 2014 will still only be 5-6 percent of our peak demand," Atienza said on the sidelines of an energy conference in London.

"Rather than have 1,400 MW that we have now we will have 2,800 MW but because of our wind power variability we will need much more."

While Spain has invested billions of euros over the last two decades on wind turbines to cut carbon emissions and fuel imports, transmission capacity between France and Spain has remained unchanged since 1982 because of public opposition to new lines across the Pyrenees and a lack of French enthusiasm for more.

Spain has succeeded in building two new links with Portugal in the last six years, rapidly bringing capacity between the two up to the same levels as with France, despite the relatively small Portuguese market.

Two more links with Portugal are expected to come into service by 2012, increasing the ability of the Iberian power system to cope with variable wind power output.

But Portugal is not big enough to solve Spain's wind variability challenge, and as long as the Iberian Peninsula remains largely isolated from the rest of Europe Madrid's huge renewable energy push will not meet its full potential to reduce European power sector emissions.

ELECTRIC CARS

Red Electrica faces its biggest problem with high wind power output at night, when demand for electricity drops regardless of how much clean electricity is available from the thousands of turbines dotted around the Spanish countryside.

The company even had to shut down some turbines in the early hours of December 30, 2009, as wet and windy weather caused a surge in green electricity generation at a time of very low demand.

Greater numbers of electric cars charging overnight could help absorb some of the extra output in the years ahead.

The system balancing benefits of electric cars prompted the British government last week to offer to pay 25 percent toward the cost of a new electric car from 2011, although Britain's wind output is still tiny compared to Spain's.

"For us it's even more important because we are now reaching a limit in which for more and more hours, especially at night, we are having difficulty integrating wind power," Atienza said.

"Apart from improving our energy security by displacing oil, improving the air quality of our cities and reduce noise pollution, the electric car is very complimentary to our bet on renewable energy."

Electric cars could vastly improve system efficiency by recharging on windy nights when industrial demand for power is low, but the recharge times must be managed to ensure the load on the system is spread through the night and does not lead to a sudden jump in car charging when demand is already at its early evening peak.

"The worst thing that can happen for the power system is that everyone who has an electric car when they get home they plug it in and it starts recharging at the same time," he said.

(Editing by Jim Marshall)