Grid challenges demand revolution not evolution from digital superheroes

A European 'supergrid' will be a critical pillar to delivering secure, decarbonised and affordable energy, says Lesley O’Connor.

And she adds that the first step to realising this ambition is to tap into the sector's "digital superpowers".

“The power of digitalisation is to leapfrog things. I would love to see some sort of coordinated effort around AI and digital. There is so much inefficiency in the way we do things today that can be stripped out with the application of digital smarts”.

The technology is there, but we need to unblock its deployment, she suggests.

“I firmly believe that the intelligent application of intelligence and digital is a superpower that we have now.”

However, it’s not only a case of deploying smart technology: it’s also a mindset shift that’s required to appreciate that the energy transition is a revolution, not an evolution, and through digitisation and innovation we have the tools to accelerate change and make a supergrid a reality.

Supergrid legacy

Lesley O’Connor's passion and drive to develop a supergrid and achieve the decarbonisation goals such a grid could achieve, is largely inherited from her father, the late renewable energy pioneer Eddie O’Connor. 

She describes him as a visionary in the industry who had a knack for identifying challenges and opportunities coming down the track. So much so, that he published a book together with Kevin O’Sullivan, the Environment and Sciences Editor at The Irish Times, entitled Supergrid – Super Solution.

It was in this book that Eddie O'Connor fleshed out his ambitious vision for a European Supergrid as an unconstrained grid, an electrification-centric system that promotes the use of renewable energy and decreased the use of liquid fuels. 

“This concept of a meshed interconnection, the supergrid, would be overlayed on top of existing, regional transmission and distribution infrastructure," his daughter tells me.

"As a lot of it would be offshore, it would be interconnecting… like an electricity highway. I like to think of it as the internet for electrons, essentially taking the generation from where it is being generated in a space and time and transmitting it to where it's needed instantaneously, just like the internet.”

O'Connor continues: “Because it's meshed, it would boost energy security. It wouldn’t be just point to point, which is how we do things now, but would have built-in redundancy to mitigate bad actor attacks.”

Of course, to achieve this, the entire energy system needs to be modernised and made fit for purpose, and there is no time to waste, she emphasises.

“This is the industrial revolution of our time, so incrementalism is not going to get us where we need to get to.”

A smart path to the Supergrid

So how do we turn this supergrid concept into reality? The first step, states O’Connor, is that we need to acknowledge that our grid, finance, and market systems are still built to accommodate fossil fuels.

She suggests we need to zoom out and redesign our systems intentionally, incentivising the right investments and encouraging innovation.

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“We need to be applying the smarts, the digital intelligence, to the challenge of the energy transformation, to leapfrog incremental changes.”

Countries that embrace innovation, emphasises O’Connor, can leapfrog others, which makes it critical to enable sandboxing, digital twins and system simulations to test solutions.

This will give rise to the innovation required, and then "we need to have the ambition and vision to apply them to our current system”.

O'Connor can't emphasise the importance of ambition and vision enough, coupled with decisive, focused and intentional action.

"I’m going back to one guiding idea I learned from a lifetime of living with and working alongside Eddie O'Connor: that if rules don't fit the purpose, you can change them." 

“If it’s important enough, you will do everything in your power to try and change them.”

Lesley O'Connor will be speaking at Enlit Europe in Bilbao, 18-20 November. Register to attend.
Also, listen to the podcast for more on O'Connor's vision to build a Supergrid and the importance of system change to achieve energy transformation.