Can ‘smart grids’ quell Europe’s next blackout?

Last Monday (28 April), 15 gigawatts of electricity capacity dropped off the Spanish and Portuguese grid, triggering one of the biggest blackouts to ever happen in Europe.  

The blackouts affected around 55 million people across Spain, Portugal, and parts of France. People were evacuated from trains, ATMs stopped working, and many were cut off from internet access.  

Experts still do not know the exact cause of the blackout, though investigators are checking if the congested national grid or malfunctioning infrastructure played a role. Old and strained energy grids elsewhere mean that no European country is safe from the same fate.  

Amsterdam's low electricity grid capacity means the city is already struggling to meet increasing demand. Late afternoons see excessive electricity consumption, while in summer the grid is often overloaded by midday surplus production from solar panels.  

The city needs a lot of investment to upgrade its infrastructure to meet these challenges. “Amsterdam is very much characterized by a city which is running towards the end of the capacity of the electricity grid,” said Hugo Niesing of Resourcefully, an energy consultancy in the city. He says the grid needs €400 million worth of upgrades, though the grid operator lacks the people, materials and time to do so.  

Instead, both demand and supply should become more flexible to ease pressure on the grid.  

Investing in energy communities 

Part of this flexibility is now coming from the city’s ‘energy communities’ – local groups that generate and deliver energy services to themselves. There are nearly 700 of these energy communities in the Netherlands. One in the Sporenburg neighbourhood of Amsterdam has 540 households contributing renewable energy to the grid via solar panels and heat pumps.  

Communities generating and delivering their own electricity lessens demand on the national grid, lessening the chances of surges in the national grid and blackouts.  

“The energy communities here are actually quite big and that is because the Dutch government at one point realized that the energy transition cannot be done without citizens,” said Jasper Klapwijk, an energy expert in the Netherlands. “You need companies, you need the state itself, but you also need the citizens and citizen collectives to actually reach your goals in the energy transition.”  

Support from locals and the government are being complemented by the European research project RESCHOOL, which brought on board a distribution system operator. They make sure that self-generated renewable electricity is delivered efficiently to households in the Sporenburg energy community.    

Encouraging behaviour that helps the grid 

The project designed an app to encourage grid-conscious behaviour and optimise power consumption. Software both measures how a Sporenburg resident is consuming energy and forecasts possible congestion problems on the network.  

Using this information, the app sends people challenges to change how they consume energy, for example by using appliances like dishwashers at a different time of the day. People who join these challenges earn points, which can later be exchanged for payments from the city of Amsterdam.  

These challenges also encourage grid-sensitive behaviour, helping to prevent blackouts and reducing the need for expensive grid upgrades. The app both helps residents to save money and energy and empowers them to participate in the community’s energy management.  

Hugo believes that education and community engagement are crucial to achieving real change. “Sharing information is needed to optimize energy consumption,” he says. “So we really want to have an interactive process with the prosumer to create understanding. To show why you are participating and what difference it makes.” 

As the pressure on Amsterdam's grid continues to grow, the Sporenburg Energy Cooperative offers a sustainable, cost-effective and community-driven way forward. In this way, the costly replacement of transformer stations can be postponed.  It’s a blueprint for the future of energy management in other cities, and its smart app is already publicly available.