Electricity prices across Europe to stabilise if 2030 targets for renewable energy are met

fpjl2 — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:24:42 +0000

Hitting the current national 2030 quotas for solar and wind energy could reduce the volatility of electricity markets by an average of 20% across 29 European countries, according to a new study from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��intensity of spikes in power prices are predicted to fall in every country by the end of the decade if commitments to green energy are met, as natural gas dependency is cut.

̽��ֱ��UK and Ireland would be the biggest beneficiaries, with 44% and 43% reductions in the severity of electricity price spikes by 2030, compared with last year.

Germany could experience a 31% decline in electricity price volatility, with the Netherlands and Belgium seeing price spikes ease by 38% and 33% respectively.

̽��ֱ��simulations conducted for the new study show that scaling up renewable energy minimises the market impact of fluctuations in natural gas price – increasing stability even when considering the reliance of renewable technologies on weather.

Some EU leaders and energy ministers have called for renewables targets on grounds of energy security as well as decarbonisation, particularly since Putin’s war on Ukraine stemmed the flow of Russian gas.

̽��ֱ��study, published in the journal Nature Energy, calculates in detail how such aims would affect the volatility of wholesale electricity prices in energy markets across Europe.

“ ̽��ֱ��volatility of energy prices is a major cause of damage to national economies,” said Laura Diaz Anadon, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Professor of Climate Change Policy.

“Consumers are still reeling from sharp increases in electricity prices brought about by natural gas shortages following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” said Anadon. “We show that hitting renewables targets reduce the likelihood of such price spikes in the future.”

Daniel Navia, a researcher with the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG), said: “Meeting renewable energy targets is not only good for carbon neutrality, but we can see it is a boost to economic resilience”

“We had probably underestimated how costly energy price shocks are to our societies, and the last crisis has been a stark reminder.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge researchers used the ̽��ֱ��’s high performance computing facilities to model a wide range of factors – from fluctuations in weather patterns and energy demands to fuel capacity – to map the current and future grids of all 27 EU nations plus the UK and Switzerland.

They assessed electricity markets in 2030 based on the commitments to renewables as stated in each nation’s national energy and climate plan.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK in particular is projected to see major benefits to its energy market stability from renewables,” said Anadon.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK has struggled with its exposure to gas prices due to a lack of energy storage and limited connections to the European grid. This has led to more hours where electricity prices are set by natural gas.”

̽��ֱ��research also suggests that wholesale prices of electricity could fall by over a quarter on average across all countries in the study by decade’s end if they stick to current national renewables targets.

Again, populations in the UK and Ireland stand to gain significantly, with electricity prices predicted to fall by around 45% by 2030, compared with the current situation.

Several of the Nordic nations could see over 60% reductions in electricity costs by 2030, while in Germany the price is predicted to fall by 34%, with Belgium seeing a similar drop of 31%. ̽��ֱ��study suggests the Netherlands could see the price of electricity fall by 41%.

While the study’s authors caution that trends in electricity prices depend on factors that are “impossible to predict”, they say their results are in line with recent outputs by institutions such as the International Energy Agency.

In fact, Navia and Anadon say their modelling may even underestimate the potential for electricity price stability across Europe, as the projections were calculated using data from 1990-2021 – before the energy crisis created by Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

“It makes sense to think about renewables as a security investment, and if we lose the momentum towards green energy, we are clearly harming the climate, but we also exposing ourselves to unknowable risks down the line,” said Anadon.

̽��ֱ��new study also charts the effects on electricity prices if countries overshoot on renewables. If Europe exceeds its renewable energy goals by 30%, electricity prices could become 50% less sensitive to natural gas, compared to just meeting renewables targets.

However, the study suggests there are tipping points where renewables cause the price of power to fall so far that it stops providing sufficient return on investment, and the green energy industries may stall.

Added Navia: “If we are to fully utilise solar and wind as a security tool, Europe might have to rethink how its energy markets are designed, and what incentives it can offer the private sector to maintain the societal insurance value it gets from renewable energy.”

National targets for solar and wind power will see reliance on natural gas plummet, reducing electricity price volatility across Europe, with major beneficiaries including the UK and Ireland, the Nordics, and the Netherlands.

̽��ֱ��UK in particular is projected to see major benefits to its energy market stability from renewables

Laura Diaz Anadon

Anton Petrus via Getty images

High voltage electricity towers combined with economic charts

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Wind turbines turn to bamboo

bjb42 — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 15:54:55 +0000

As increasing attention turns to how we might generate energy from sustainable and renewable sources – from the natural resources of wind, solar and tidal power, among others – research in the development of the best materials to harness this energy is imperative. Jim Platts from the Institute for Manufacturing has worked for over 20 years on wind turbine design and most recently on developing a new type of blade made from bamboo.

Blade technology

̽��ֱ��large rotating blades that make up wind turbines must work at the limits of their tensile strength when facing into the wind and revolving the turbine shaft that generates electricity. From the beginning, the best blades have used wood – Nature’s own fibre-reinforced composite material – as the primary structural material, comprising some 70% of the weight of the blade. Wood has excellent fatigue behaviour and an unbeatable strength-to-cost ratio, as well as being a low-energy input material. As Jim Platts explains: ‘Most people don’t think of wood as a technical material, but it has superb properties: wood uses more than an order of magnitude less energy input to provide the required stiffness compared with materials such as fibreglass, steel and aluminium. In energy technology terms, this ranks it as a technical material of the highest order.’

̽��ֱ��bonus of bamboo

Early blades in the 1980s used African mahogany, moving on to poplar, and then more recently to Finnish birch. But there is one type of wood that is better than all of these in having the most ideal properties for blade construction: bamboo (particularly the variety known as Mao bamboo). For China, which has about 2.8 million hectares of Mao bamboo, much of which grows on mountainous areas unusable for farming, this is an exciting new use of a material that has been employed in many different ways for thousands of years.

Jim Platts has been working in China and Cambridge, analysing the tensile strength and stiffness properties of bamboo and identifying how best to select and prepare bamboo to provide maximum benefits in blade design. Meanwhile, in China, the manufacturing and supply routes are being forged, and it’s anticipated that the first blades will be made by the end of this year.

‘What’s particularly attractive about this technology,’ he comments, ‘is that bamboo brings a new perspective to carbon trading because bamboo sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, building it into high-strength fibres. In constructing wind turbine blades from bamboo, the blades have captured enough wind energy to pay back the energy used in their construction after just two days – an impressive statistic for a turbine with an average life of 20 years.’

As China readies itself to develop its own wind turbine industry, Jim Platts and his Chinese partners have shown that bamboo can be used as an alternative to energy-intensive fibres and polymers for this high technology application. ̽��ֱ��use of bamboo in this way makes wind energy an attractive proposition for future sustainable electricity generation.

For further information, please contact Jim Platts (mjp@eng.cam.ac.uk) at the Institute for Manufacturing in the Department of Engineering.

Bamboo – one of China’s most precious commodities – is showing great promise as the material of choice for building wind turbines.

What’s particularly attractive about this technology is that bamboo brings a new perspective to carbon trading because bamboo sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, building it into high-strength fibres.

Jim Platts

̽��ֱ��Pug Father on flickr

Bamboo

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̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - wind

Electricity prices across Europe to stabilise if 2030 targets for renewable energy are met

Wind turbines turn to bamboo