Germany will prioritise the expansion of an electricity power grid capable of absorbing a growing share of renewable energy, the country's Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle said at an energy conference in Berlin yesterday (18 January).
"If Germany wants to remain a strong economy in a competitive global market, and if the Germans want to be able to use energy from renewable sources, we have to put much more emphasis on the extension and construction of our power grids," he said.
Building a European energy grid was also an important step toward a single European energy market, Bruederle added.
Last November, EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger announced that Europe would need to spend €1 trillion over the next decade on energy infrastructure to meet the EU's ambitious 2020 plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions and safeguard energy supplies.
Bruederle reinforced this vision with a warning that measures to safeguard power supplies were being paralysed as networks aged and developed without integration. US-style blackouts as a result of overloaded grids were one possibility.
"This is unacceptable for an industrial nation," Bruederle told the Handelsblatt conference to applause.
The biggest problem he foresaw was public acceptance. "Without acceptance there is no network expansion, and without that there is no room for more renewables," he said. "We will have to make this connection very clear."
If people wanted renewable energies, they would have to accept more grids in their neighbourhoods, he said.
The German government will now move to support integrating offshore wind parks and border coupling points to a wider European grid network, and speed up processes to lay more underground cables.
Germany's energy-intensive industry depends on reliable power supplies of around 600 terawatt hours a year. As a result, last November a government agency said that 3,600 kilometres of new high voltage grids were needed.
It was also reported on 17 January that the government was planning to advance the next scheduled reductions in solar power feed-in tariffs of up to 12 percentage points by six months to 1 July 2011.
The minister hinted that this measure was currently under consideration.