Electricity and gas, the great alliance for new green energy

The enormous challenge of the energy transition is balanced on the great alliance between the large electricity and gas networks. Two partners, allies with a common interest, capable (as has already been demonstrated) of coordinating strategies, growing and modernising together, planning a common course. The aim? Lending credibility to our country’s journey towards the scenario set out by large international bodies and taken up by our National Plan for Energy and Climate (Pniec), to support a new phase of economic development by drastically reducing polluting emissions through a journey with fixed milestones: between now and 2030, and then to 2040.

Our energy authority (ARERA) formally called the two partners together, starting the process three years ago. Terna and Snam, the two main players of the challenge, responded with conviction, aware that decarbonisation, modernisation and business are not diametrically opposed. Indeed, the powerful synergies will not only be good for the environment but also for the operating capabilities and profitability of two sectors that are so close and naturally synergistic with each other.

Synchronicity with institutions. “Thanks also to the drive of the regulator,” - underlines Luca Marchisio, Terna's System Strategy Manager - “we are seriously committed to looking at the complexity of the energy system in order to respect the binding community objectives and helping to perfect the national energy plan. In this regard, it is essential to create scenarios that go at least to 2040 by planning investments into new technologies at all levels based on increasing daring developments, which impose corrections, sometimes even significant ones, with respect to business as usual.”

Here are the operational steps that have already been taken. With a biennial plan for defining, processing and perfecting the scenarios that we will move forward on together. To set strategies, commitments and technologies for shared grid progress. A permanent "work in progress", which is based on a methodology that has now moved out of the experimental phase. Awareness, first and foremost. At the cost of revealing, without too much modesty, a reality that is anything but simple. Here, using scientific rigour, three energy scenarios have been outlined which are in turn related to the National Plan for Energy and Climate (Pniec), which can be used to evaluate, simulate and then transform into operational measures, the strategies to be adopted in simultaneously by the two sectors. The basic scenario, as always happens and must happen in these meteorological situations, is the scenario of reference and assumes that no particular actions will be taken in order to correct the normal conservative dynamics of the market: Business as usual (BAU).

Support but do nothing? It would be - the confirmation that comes from the two partners is even trivial - the lead up to that global disaster produced by climate collapse that has been predicted by experts despite the disturbing deniers who are ever present. The targets for 2030 and 2040 would account for an inevitable failure, as stated by Terna and Snam in the scenario description document updated at the end of last September. Also thanks to the support of institutional actors, sector operators and research institutes, called together to three dedicated workshops.

Comparing Scenarios. Here are the two alternative scenarios called on to lend credibility to the objectives, provided that the necessary optimism on the evolution of the macroeconomic framework, called to support major investments, finds the necessary justification (and this is already an unknown factor). Both scenarios CEN (centralised) and the DEC (decentralised) offer an annual growth in GDP of 1.2% with an increase in the population of 2.4 million inhabitants by 2040, so as to give body and substance to important investments focused above all on energy efficiency and on the development of technologies that know how to combine efficiency with a drastic reduction of emissions.

In the CEN scenario, the objectives are achieved with the containment of consumption (especially thanks to the efficiency gains and not thanks to a generic containment of the requirement that would have recessive effects) and a strong development of the electricity carrier and renewable energies, not only those that cannot be programmed like wind and solar but also with an increasing availability of programmable renewable sources, such as green gases that will be able to use existing methane infrastructures.

In the DEC scenario, which hypothesizes a greater development of decentralised generation systems (in the name of the ambitious landscape of micro generation in a system of exchanges between plants, even personal plants, and network), the aim is an even faster development of the electric carrier and of non-programmable renewables. In any case, the two alternative scenarios to "do nothing" (BAU) provide for a significant growth in overall electricity consumption, motivated by the greater overall efficiency of the electric carrier, with a stability in gas consumption in the CEN scenario (otherwise growing in the BAU scenario) and a moderate decrease in the DEC scenario, which thanks to the efficiency of the electric carrier should guarantee lower overall energy consumption.

The role of gas is still confirmed as "fundamental" - as stated in the document describing the 2019 scenarios by Terna and Snam - “in all the scenarios analysed to enable the energy transition" also thanks to the progressive replacement of natural gas with green gases: biomethane and synthetic gases, which in turn could find an important contribution from the new frontier of hydrogen. But there must also be a commitment to an even more courageous technological progress that will maximize decarbonisation. The keys to this are the growth of energy efficiency measures and technological change, electrification of consumption and, where the latter is not technically and economically sustainable, the spread of green gas.