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Europe could teach America a thing or two about interconnection.
As the invasion of Ukraine raged last year, all eyes were on Europe’s power grid. Gas prices skyrocketed, Scandinavia’s water levels fell, and France’s trusty nuclear power plants went offline. It was a test of whether the world’s most interconnected energy grid could keep the lights on under extreme stress — and Europe passed. Today, as increasingly volatile weather patterns wreak havoc on infrastructure, the grid is proving to be more important than ever.
“Climate change is going to make us rely on the grid more,” Michael Pollitt, a professor of economics at Cambridge and an expert in energy economics, told me. “It’s not just gas price effects across Europe, it’s low water years and low wind years that will have impacts everywhere.”
This summer’s extreme heat could have been the next greatest threat to the power grid following the invasion of Ukraine. But instead, the stresses posed by recent weather have shown the strength of Europe’s power grid, proving the importance of interconnection in an era of global warming.
Europe’s power grid is made up of a series of interconnected localized grids. The primary one is the continental grid, where about 15% of the continent’s energy is traded across borders every year. This grid serves 400 million consumers across 24 countries, including most of the European Union countries, plus the Balkans and Turkey. These 24 countries are also connected to several other grids: the Nordic grid, the British grid, the Irish grid, and, as of August this year, the Baltic grid. Those additions bring electricity to more than 600 million consumers. In addition, there are discussions about connecting North Africa’s power grid, and especially Morocco, which would provide a rich source of solar energy.
Each country invests in what they do best: Norway champions hydropower, France has nuclear power plants, the U.K. invests in wind turbines, Spain does solar, etc. And each one can sell the excess energy to the grid to assist other countries. When water levels are low in the summer months, Norway relies on countries like Spain, who have ample power from their solar fields. In the cloudier winter months, Norway returns the favor. There is a call for faster progress on interconnection and transmission to make this into an even more reliable “Super Grid.”
This tool provides an interactive map of the grid today, and the expected changes up until 2040.
This single market allows for an energy security not seen in the United States, which has several disconnected state or regional grids with much more limited interconnection. This not only restricts the distribution of renewable energy in the U.S., but it can lead to blackouts, most famously in Texas in 2021.
One reason that Europe’s grid has proved remarkably resilient is that mutual reliance also means mutually assured destruction.
“If a country were to reduce exports, it would reduce costs in their country,” said Pollitt, referring to fears last year that European countries would unplug from the interconnected grid to safeguard their own energy supplies. “But you barely think about that for too long before you realize it’s a nuclear option to keep prices down.”
EU countries came together to agree on a gas price cap to contain the energy crisis in December 2022. But the rise in gas prices was a powerful incentive for countries to increase their reliance on renewables. Wind and solar generated 10% more energy compared with the same period in 2021-2022, saving the region 12 billion euros in gas imports (about the same in dollars), according to Ember, an energy think tank.
“I’m very happy to see European solidarity manifest itself and be resilient even though there was some temptation to go it alone,” Kristian Ruby, the secretary general for Eurelectric, the association for the electricity sector in Europe, told me. “By standing together and doubling down on solutions, we’ve seen them keep the lights on during an extremely difficult time.”
Extreme weather is the next big hurdle for the grid to overcome. “There’s no doubt that extreme weather events are becoming a strain on electricity operators,” said Ruby. A recent report from Eurelectric says that all power systems are exposed to the effects of extreme weather, including generation, transmission, and distribution. For hydropower, low water levels are detrimental and extreme cold can cause ice and blockages. Geothermal and nuclear energy become less efficient during heat waves because they require water and cold air for cooling. Many of these plants are also vulnerable to coastal and inland flooding.
This summer in particular, the grid was put to the test. Extreme heat in Spain and Italy pushed the grid to its upper limit. Using power from places like Britain, Norway and Switzerland, Spain was able to provide the power needed. It also benefited from investments in solar panels, which supplied 20 percent more solar power than in the summer of 2022.
The grid’s strength is in its variability. “Different types of weather phenomena call for different coping strategies. Resilience is about diversity. It’s about having a mix of different things. One technology will not solve it alone,” said Ruby.
Renewable energy sources differ based on the conditions in which they are built, which can make the electricity supply more adaptable. If there’s enough interconnection to bring power from, say, where it’s sunny or windy to where it’s needed, countries are much less likely to experience blackouts during severe weather. Whereas with fossil fuel based energy like coal plants, the energy supply is concentrated and more susceptible to shocks.
Despite the success, some experts are concerned that transmission isn’t growing fast enough to handle electrification. People are buying more heat pumps and using electric vehicles, but NGO WindEurope says that the grid itself is not expanding at the same pace. Experts also say that as loads increase, electricity flows will become more complex. Ruby advocates more digitalization in order to handle these complex flows.
The EU Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson wrote an op-ed piece in the Financial Times this month saying that Europe must sustain a fast pace in rolling out renewables and electrifying the economy. She references the need to integrate intermittent renewable power and adapt more decentralized electricity systems. She says the emphasis needs to be on transmission and distribution grids.
The EU reduced the length of time needed for permitting electricity transmission. It also introduced new emergency legislation last year to accelerate the authorization of renewable projects.
Despite concerns about pace, experts seem generally optimistic about the EU's grid. “EU energy and climate policy are really a success story in European coordination and interdependence,” said Pollitt.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.