vorlagefürnomos(deutsch)v1.0-dlrportal（16页）.docVIP

Solar Electricity Transfer from MENA to Europe The option of producing solar electricity under the ideal meteorological conditions in the sunbelt countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and transferring part of this electricity to Europe (EU) has been discussed and proposed in many occasions in the past /Knies et al. 1999/, /TREC 2006/, /Asplund 2004/, /Czisch 2005/, /DPG 2005/, /WBGU 2003/. It also has been proposed to use hydrogen as energy carrier to produce storable renewable energy comparable to fuel oil and natural gas to supply electricity, heat and transportation. However, as brought to the point by /Bossel 2005/, a solar electricity transfer by hydrogen would force three quarters of the solar power generators to work exclusively for covering the energy losses of the hydrogen conversion chain (Figure 11). Under this perspective, the use of hydrogen as an energy carrier for solar electricity from North Africa to Europe must be discarded. Figure 11: Comparing the losses of electricity transport by electrons and by hydrogen /Bossel 2005/ This chapter describes the technical possibilities of solar electricity transfer through the conventional alternating current (AC) electricity grid and by means of an additional future backbone grid based on high voltage direct current (HVDC) technology. Present Electricity Transfer Capacities in EUMENA The interconnected synchronous European network of the Union for the Coordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE) supplies about 450 million people with electric energy. Europe has a very dense network of high voltage power lines of different capacity, from 132 kV to lines with 750 kV (Figure 12). Currently, the union counts 23 member states, 33 transmission providers and 230,000 km in the high voltage network supplying 2300 TWh/y at an installed plant capacity of 560 GW. In wide parts of the UCTE 380 kV is the highest voltage level, whereas transmission voltages of 500 kV, 750 kV and even 1200