It is harder for new electric grids to balance supply and demand

In Pulheim, a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia, three people are looking after the grid run by Amprion, a German systems operator. Their workspace has a hushed atmosphere, something between a theatre and a church. Both the lighting and walls are soft. A vast screen, five metres high and 20 metres wide, sits concave in front of their desks. It displays a circuit diagram of the grid Amprion manages in Germany and of the other grids onto which it abuts. Amprion’s grid is an integrated part of the Continental Europe Synchronous Area (CESA), which covers 24 countries from Portugal to Poland. All told, it can call on some 900GW of all sorts of generating capacity.