What has public participation brought to power grid construction?

"In recent years, there have been almost no new surface high-voltage transmission lines built in Western Europe, and this is likely to be the trend in the future," Amilha, director of grids and regional initiatives at the European Commission, headquartered in Belgium, told the author.

In Germany, the average time for planning and construction of a large transmission network is about 10 years, and the most troublesome issue for grid operators is the expansion of the high-voltage grid. This is partly due to the decision-making process of German grid planning and the public participation that plays an important role in it - the interests of each group involved must be taken into account.

Germany’s situation will no longer be special in terms of grid construction in the next decade or more, because other EU countries are becoming more and more like Germany. The experience of public participation in grid expansion is also a double-edged sword for other countries. How to establish a communication mechanism with the public is a lesson that grid companies need to learn during the energy transition process.

At present, the greatest success of Germany's energy transformation comes from the rapid growth of renewable energy power generation, a large part of which comes from wind power. However, wind resources are mainly located in the north, and industrial areas in the south and west are the central load areas. Therefore, the transportation capacity of the power grid has become a bottleneck for Germany to further expand the use of renewable energy power.

To solve the problem of "difficulty in delivering electricity to the north", the German Transmission Network Operator (TSO) and the federal government are accelerating the construction of north-south transmission lines to ease the problem. By 2025, they plan to build 4,650 kilometers of new transmission lines, including four high-voltage direct current lines, of which 900 kilometers have been built. Germany is a country with a high population density, which means that the construction of the power grid is more difficult than in other countries. The expansion plan has been proposed for several years and has often been opposed by community residents. Public protests have emerged one after another. The plan for where the new line will be built has been changed again and again, and negotiations have been deadlocked many times.

"Everyone wants the energy transition, but they will oppose it as long as it changes things in their backyard. Germans would rather pay high electricity prices than cause damage to the surrounding landscape," said the head of the Renewable Grid Initiative (RGI).

Compared to other industries, the disadvantage of power grid expansion is that the new grid cannot bring visible benefits to local residents (such as building highways to make cars travel faster, laying fiber optic cables to have a higher-speed network). Instead, people are worried that the power lines passing through their backyards will have adverse effects on their health, the environment, and house prices.

In order to gain public acceptance, the German federal government decided in 2015 to give priority to laying underground cables, of which four large north-south DC power lines will be mostly laid underground. This also means that the cost of grid construction will increase by 3 to 8 billion euros, and part of the planning process will need to be restarted.

But Germany is no longer an exception in this regard. TSOs in other EU countries are also struggling with grid expansion, especially surface high-voltage transmission lines. In 2016, another cross-border transmission project, Alégro, between Belgian grid operator Elia and German company Amprion, also used underground cables.

According to Sander, Amprion's engineering director, once a fault is discovered, it will take nearly a month to inspect and repair underground transmission lines, while traditional aerial cables only take a little over a day with the help of drones and manual work. However, in the opinion of power experts, even if it is time-consuming and costly, choosing underground cables is more economical than redispatch.

Even with the underground cables, the grid company still has to work hard to communicate with the public. As the land involved involves agricultural land, local residents have raised questions about soil safety and land use compensation, and the grid company still needs to reach a consensus with the affected villagers.

However, in the repeated negotiations with local residents, the power grid company is also learning how to communicate effectively with residents and establish a dialogue mechanism. They found that it is relatively easy to establish a dialogue mechanism in the early stage, and there is less opposition from the masses, but the willingness of the masses to participate in the topic is often not high at that time; in the later stage, people are often more willing to express their opinions, but the contradictions will also be more intense. They summarized this process as a communication paradox.

The experience of communicating with the public has taught other countries a lesson. Communication with the public began in the early stages of the project, including the German Federal Network Agency, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, and the four major TSOs, which all set up communication departments and hired relevant legal and policy personnel to communicate with representatives of the public involved in the grid expansion to ensure a transparent decision-making process.

Germany's power grid companies also view this as a learning process. "Early communication is far more effective than communication during the process, and public communication is also a compulsory course for engineers," said Sander.