Europe's electricity industry has warned that unprecedented investments are needed to upgrade ageing electricity grids, or the EU will fail to meet its clean energy targets.
The EU's plans to curb climate change foresee millions more electric vehicles on European roads by 2030, as well as a huge expansion of renewable energy, and electric heat pumps starting to replace fossil fuel boilers in houses.
Electricity industry association Eurelectric said this week that to support those goals, average annual investments in Europe's electricity grids from now to 2050 need to be at least 84% higher than they were in 2021.
“We want to transform the entire energy system at record speed, replace fossil fuels — oil and gas — with electricity. So we add loads of new generation capacity to the grid, we add electric cars, heat pumps,” said Eurelectric secretary-general Kristian Ruby.
“Therefore, you cannot say today what we used to do 10 years ago will be just fine for the next 10 years. It's just not the case,” he said.
The European Commission has said power grid investments of €584bn (R11.7-trillion) a year are needed until 2030 to meet green goals, with a large portion coming from the private sector, or tariffs.
EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson said: “If we do not not upgrade grid infrastructure very fast, we will not achieve our 2030 targets.”
Forty percent of Europe's power distribution grids are more than 40 years old. Most are designed around large centralised power plants, and will need upgrading to distribute power from the fleet of local solar panels and wind farms expected to plug in this decade.
Reuters
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