Eclipse could power down Europe
Solar panels will switch off across continent as moon blocks the sun
The first major eclipse of the emerging solar age will place unprecedented strain on electricity grids as panels switch off and then on again.
The moon will cross in front of the sun on Friday, blocking about 80 per cent of its light across Europe from 8 to 11 a. m. London time. In Germany, the eclipse will briefly turn off thousands of panels, which provide about 40 per cent of the nation’s power on sunny days.
A drop of that magnitude will test the ability of utilities to keep the lights on as grid operators switch to usually idle natural- gas and coal plants to make up for the lost solar power.
Failure would add to pressure for higher investment in gridcontrol technology — and boost power prices in the process.
“Managing this event on the world’s largest interconnected grid is an unprecedented challenge,” said Konstantin Staschus, secretary- general of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, or ENTSOE.
The darkest part of the eclipse will tear across the North Atlantic Ocean past southern Iceland, the Faroe Islands and reach Norway’s Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic. Mainland Europe will see the sun partly obscured, with 87 per cent cover in London, 83 per cent in Denmark and about 25 per cent in Turkey.
Previous eclipses, such as one in 1999, passed without affecting power markets because photovoltaics only took off around 2004. Germany, which has about 38 gigawatts of Europe’s 81 gigawatts of solar capacity, will see a 70 per cent slump in PV generation at about 10: 40 a. m. local time, according to the MeteoGroup forecaster. A gigawatt is about equal to the capacity of a nuclear reactor.
There’ll be “good expected sunshine across the southern half of Germany,” Stephen Davenport, MeteoGroup’s senior energy meteorologist, said Tuesday by email.
“Assuming cloud does not increase too quickly, then there will be a surge of about 14- 15 gigawatts to a peak of about 19- 20 gigawatts once the event is over.”
Electricity markets will ripple from the effects of the eclipse all morning. Danske Commodities A/S, a power broker, is increasing staff because consumption is hard to predict and may shift depending on “how many people go outside to look at it,” said Bo Palmgren, the company’s head of intraday trading.
“When you have plants ramping up and down, there is the potential for outages,” Palmgren said Monday from Aarhus, Denmark. “The hours before and after the eclipse will be interesting.”
Swedish utility Vattenfall AB will seek to profit by selling output from power plants that normally aren’t competitive, including gas- and oilfired generators that “cost several hundred euros per megawatt- hour to operate,” Hartmuth Fenn, head of intraday market access and dispatch, said by phone from Amsterdam on March 12.
Italy has the region’s second- biggest solar market and will also be affected, although more of the sun will be visible at that latitude. Terna Rete Elettrica Nazionale Spa, the nation’s grid operator, expects to lose about seven gigawatts of the 19 gigawatts of available PV supplies.
Failures in one region would have an impact everywhere else because of interconnections between 34 national grids in Europe, according to RTE, the French network operator.
“If the loss of production is not immediately replaced by other forms of generation, it could pose a risk to the network and lead to power cuts,” RTE said on its website.
Weather forecasts for Friday predict sunny skies in Berlin, Rome and Paris. If that holds, prices for power reserve capacity “could rise extremely” in Germany, said Stephanie Moeller, a spokeswoman for RWE AG’s energy trading unit RWE Supply & Trading GmbH.
The eclipse will help Germany test its ability to absorb variable power supplies from renewable generators which, in the case of solar, switch off at night and with wind don’t operate on calm days. By 2030, about half of Germany’s power will come from renewables, said Agora Energiewende, a research group. Grid operators have yet to make their biggest planned investments to cope with unsteady supplies.
“If today’s inflexible power system succeeds in managing the solar eclipse, then the power system of 2030 will easily manage comparable situations,” Patrick Graichen, head of Agora, said by email.
Managing this event on the world’s largest interconnected grid is an unprecedented challenge.