The rapid build-up of wind and solar power may be vital to combat climate change, but the rate of renewables deployment in Europe is not fast enough to even replace the nuclear power due to be decommissioned in the coming years, says International Energy Agency (IEA) chief economist Laszlo Varro.

“I don’t see any credible prospect of Europe maintaining its existing level of nuclear production,” he told the Energy 4.0: When Energy Meets Internet conference in London on Thursday. “In fact, if I dig into the current decommissioning schedules of nuclear reactors in Europe, by the mid-2020s, Europe is going to lose nuclear production at roughly twice the rate of the recent deployment of wind and solar production.

“[Nuclear] is currently the largest low-carbon source in the European [electricity] system by far and plays a critically important role in maintaining electricity security, so losing it creates some complications which need to be discussed in a more structured fashion.”

Varro also pointed out that the rate of wind and solar deployment globally was nowhere near enough to meet the 2C goal agreed by all countries in the Paris Agreement.

“Wind and solar has been doing well, but whatever we have done for wind and solar so far will have to be just a taste of things to come,” he told delegates at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminster.

“If we’re going to take 2C climate stabilisation seriously, we will need to scale up wind and solar deployment globally by roughly a factor of three compared to the current speed. Now the good news is that the average levelised cost of energy for wind and solar is increasingly becoming attractive. The bad news is that the levelised cost itself becomes a meaningless concept.

“What matters is not the cost of solar and wind production, what matters is the ability of the system to effectively incorporate that wind and solar production.”

He continued: “Transmission development should be a policy priority. Integrating electricity markets at the European scale should be a policy priority. It is a major advantage in solving the problem. But we still have volatility even at the continental scale.”

Wholesale changes to European energy markets and regulatory regimes will also be vital, he added, later telling Recharge that the European Commission’s planned clean energy package will be an important first step.

He also told delegates that there are roughly 500 hours of cold, dark winter evenings in Europe every year when there will simply not be enough sun or wind to generate enough clean energy to meet electricity demand across the continent. “[For this reason], gas capacity will continue to play an important role… but for the past couple of years we have seen a collapse in investor confidence in gas capacity and a major wave of decommissioning of gas capacity. This is something we will have to [look at] again.”

Due to these cold, dark winters, he explained, it would be almost impossible for European consumers to become self-sufficient.

“Under the European climate it’s not going to be practically possible [for consumers] to disconnect from the grid. If you run the numbers for the winter/summer cycle, you [find that you] will need 1,800 Tesla batteries to store enough electricity for the winter if you wanted to be self-sufficient from your rooftop solar panels — so make sure that you have a big garage.

“The idea that the electricity network becomes a stranded asset, I think that’s completely false.”

The Energy 4.0: When Internet Meets Energy conference was co-hosted by European electricity industry association Eurelectric and international consulting and engineering firm Pöyry.

Transition

IEA: Wind and PV build-out too slow to replace ageing nuclear