Electricity Engineers Association meets in Wellington.

Phil Southwell, the immediate past chair of International Study Committee C1 represented CIGRE as a keynote speaker at the annual Electricity Engineers Association Conference in Wellington, New Zealand in June this year. 

Phil’s presentation titled, “Global Power System Trends and Implications for the Future” covered recent developments in power systems around the world with a particular emphasis on Germany, China, the US, Ireland and South Australia. 

These countries were chosen as they provide good examples of large-scale investment in renewable energy.  Ireland and South Australia are particularly interesting as they are weakly connected to other power systems and renewables form a very high percentage of their total installed generation.

A particular emphasis was placed on Germany, which has almost 80GW of installed wind and solar generation.  While their peak load is only 80GW, they intend to increase their renewable generation by at least another 80GW over the next 20 years.  This will present major engineering challenges that CIGRE is ideally placed to help solve.

Key trends identified were:

• The increasing power system stress and uncertainty due to massive renewable installation,
• The drive to economically reduce the pollution impact of massive growth,
• The game changing impact of shale gas,
• The potential for the remaining 1 billion people to gain access to electricity, and
• The role of large-scale interconnection in rapid power system growth.

 The presentation was very well received by those in attendance.  A copy of Phil's presentation can be downloaded here.