Swiss national grid company Swissgrid, together with a group of Swiss energy companies, expects to publish a white paper on how Switzerland can integrate up to 40 GW of solar energy by 2050 while maintaining safe and reliable operation of the electricity grid.
SwitzerlandNational transmission system operator Swissgrid has released a white paper detailing how the country can integrate its target 40 GW of installed PV capacity by 2050, building on the approximately 9.62 GW deployed at the end of last year.
There are more than 300,000 PV systems providing solar energy in Switzerland, most of which are smaller systems on roofs. Although none are currently directly connected to Swissgrid’s transmission grid, the operator says it is crucial that future solar expansion in Switzerland is system-friendly, regardless of the network level, to ensure the safe and reliable operation of the transmission grid at all times.
The white paperdeveloped in collaboration with a team of experts from the Swiss energy sector, says that the integration of up to 40 GW of solar energy into the Swiss electricity system is “hardly conceivable” under current processes and preconditions. It adds that only a consistent interplay of regulations, market signals, incentives and processes will enable targeted integration.
Christof Bucher, professor of PV systems at the Bern University of Applied Sciences and one of the experts who worked on the paper, told pv magazine the integration of solar energy into the electricity grid requires far-reaching reforms of the Swiss energy system. “It will not be enough to simply develop two or three new market products for energy balancing,” he said. “The entire system needs to be overhauled.”
One of the most important measures outlined in the document is the creation of framework conditions for new technologies and decentralized systems, as well as uniform specifications for PV systems regarding their behavior in the event of communication failures, grid failures and cybersecurity.
The document also calls for a reduction in the grid connection capacity of solar power plants. It says a grid designed for 100% of installed PV capacity is “technically nor economically sensible” and instead suggests that connection capacity could be reduced by up to 50% – which Swissgrid says would result in around 15% of energy not being supplied to the grid over the course of the year – while allowing the system owner to consume or store energy not supplied to the grid, replacing existing maximum feed-in priorities.
Bucher said that solar energy is currently being prioritized, which is disrupting the market and leading to certain instabilities, from high volatility to saturation. “The difficulty for the legislature will be to abolish this priority feed-in without jeopardizing the economic viability and thus the expansion of PV,” he suggested.
Other proposals in the document include no further financial incentives for feeding electricity back into the grid when prices are negative. a focus on building capacity rather than maximizing annual yield, so that solar energy can make a significant contribution to supply during the colder and winter months, and a mandatory move to flexibility services by integrating storage, flexible consumption and intelligent power and energy management to keep PV systems profitable.
Photo by Sergio Zhukov on Unsplash
Bucher said storage systems will be critical to mitigating the effect of solar energy on the energy system and will be installed on a large scale in a decentralized manner.
“Once they are built, they can be used flexibly for all kinds of other purposes. I expect that many so-called gold mines, such as the balancing energy markets, will disappear, because battery storage systems will undermine each other in the markets,” Bucher explains. “But that’s fine and in the long run will lead to stable, well-functioning markets with less volatility than we see today.”
Bucher also explained that storage systems will have a direct impact on the PV production profile, which he said is currently around 15-20% in the energy system, but should be closer to 50%.
The report’s white paper adds that it is important to prioritize measures with long-term effects that are difficult or expensive to correct, such as defining standards and requirements for systems.
“Once installed, subsequent modifications to PV systems require costly retrofits – including difficult discussions about cost sharing and transition periods,” the article explains. “Because the systems installed today will remain connected to the electricity grid for twenty years or more, no time can be wasted in defining the necessary connection conditions and requirements.”
Bucher said work is already underway on almost all of the points mentioned in the white paper.
“However, work on distant topics such as support schemes and balancing energy markets is rarely coordinated. The White Paper aims to act as a coordinating force between these topics,” he explained.. “For example, it says to a working group of distribution system operators: ‘What you are doing is excellent and important, but keep in mind that it has these and these side effects. You have to mitigate these.’”
At the request of pv magazine If Swiss regulations require changes to incorporate the measures outlined in the document, Bucher said distribution system operators could already implement many of the necessary measures today, but have no incentive to do so.
“Changes in the law could force them to do so,” he suggested. “I also see a need for change in balancing energy markets, which today are still optimized for large power plants that are not dependent on the weather. The barriers to market access for prosumers are too high. However, these changes do not necessarily require regulatory changes.”
This content is copyrighted and may not be reused. If you would like to collaborate with us and reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
Popular content
