The design of electrical grids becomes more important with greater use of renewables which generate electricity unevenly. Some ways of improving a grid are to:
make it bigger, so that the unevenness tends to be smoothed out.
connect storage facilities to generating facilities.
use smarter load management.
Ten European nations signed a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ on an offshore North Sea electric grid in december 2010. An undersea HVDC grid in the North sea would connect offshore wind farms from a wide area to the mainland, and would also connect pumped hydro in Norway to other countries. More details in this BBC story and this Nature article.
In order to handle peaks in demand for electrical power that exceed available capacity there is little option but to cut off power from a section of users. This is known as load shedding.
The ‘smart grid’ could help us deal with increased fluctuations in the electric grid due to increased usage of wind and solar power:
For related issues here, see:
The Nuclear Green Revolution, Can interconnected windfarms replace baseload power plants? Part I, by Bill Hannahan.
Archer and Jacobson, Supplying baseload power and reducing transmission requirements by interconnecting wind farms, JAMC 46 (2007).
FESA from Orion Innovations is proprietary software which models energy systems scenarios, including meteorological data, economic analysis and technology performance.