Grid Computing to Help Get Renewable Energy into the UK National Grid

A European grid computing project worth £4.7m could solve the approaching problem of how to co-ordinate the electricity output of a proliferation of new wind farms and solar power stations.

The UK power grid is today dominated by relatively few large power stations, but the move towards renewable energy will mean an explosion of smaller energy sources around the country.

Dr Peter Hobson, project leader of Brunel University's portion of the GridCC project, said that dynamically co-ordinating alternative energy source output on the national grid will prove difficult in the future. Grid computing, which harnesses the processing power of many interconnected computers at different locations may be the answer, he said.

'Today renewables contribute intermittently to the power grid, but in 15 years we're aiming for 30 per cent of our power from alternative sources and it's not viable to have them leaping on and off unexpectedly. We need a way to handle the change frommonitoring a few hundred power stations with private networks, to controlling 30,000 alternative energy generators.'

The project aims to develop the equipment and software needed to build a grid computing network that could autonomously process the instrument data from thousands of energy sources, and allow the power industry to optimise the ebb and flow of electricity on their national grids.

e4engineering.com article on GridCC Project