Aug 14,2008 - airtricity.com

The Supergrid is a high voltage sub sea transmission network.

It could ultimately cover the Baltic Sea, North Sea, Irish Sea, English Channel, the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean.

The Supergrid treats wind as a continental resource and enables EU member states to share in this enormous energy source, to their mutual advantage.

This will be achieved by the member states cooperating in the capture of their common wind resources and the conversion of this free energy into a reliable and predictable supply of electricity.

As power is always being generated on the Supergrid it can be fed into the national grids to meet electricity demand.

The Supergrid also acts as an interconnector between national markets and thereby helps to create a properly functioning internal market in electricity.

This will bring additional benefits for European consumers in terms of greater competition, lower prices and increased security of supply.

In common with other natural resources, wind has its own particular characteristics in terms of physics and energy conversion. The most notable features are its limitless supply and fluctuating availability. The challenge in harnessing this energy supply is to overcome the problem of variability by ensuring a reliable source of power from wind.

In the vision offered here, the problem of variability is solved by exploiting the meteorological characteristics of the European weather system. At any given time, areas of high pressure are matched by areas of low pressure some hundreds of kilometres apart. In this way it can be said that regions negatively correlate with each other in terms of wind availability. In short, the wind is always blowing somewhere.

By building wind farms in the seas around Northern and Western Europe, as well as areas of the Mediterranean, it would become possible to harness the wind whenever it is blowing and transform it into a stable source of power. This exploitation of the negative correlation between regional weather systems turns a perceived disadvantage of wind into a strength.

From a European Union perspective, the Supergrid offers a truly unique opportunity for joint action by the Member States in pursuit of a common good. The Supergrid will best function if it stretches geographically from the Baltic Sea via the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean . At any given point along this superhighway, the power generated is a common European asset.

http://www.airtricity.com/england/wind_farms/supergrid/offshore_supergrid_layout/

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