08
Nov
2011
News
Threat of blackout - fact or fiction?
ORF presents the Dok1 format "Nichts geht mehr: Sieben Tage ohne Strom " - a self-experiment by Hanno Settele to survive a week of blackout. In September 2021, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Austrian Power Grid (APG) sign a cooperation agreement on blackout prevention. The aim is for the police to remain operational for 72 hours to ensure the safety of the population during the so-called "chaos phase". What would remain is the economic damage of a blackout - 1.18 billion euros a day according to information from the BMI.
Fiction sounds different and the danger of a blackout has become a reality today. But what is behind it?
Austria set itself very ambitious targets in July 2021 with the EAG Act. By 2030, all the electricity required nationwide is to be generated from renewable energy sources.
Wind and solar energy can never be produced evenly. This leads to strong fluctuations in the electricity grid, jeopardises stability and increases the risk of a blackout. The demanded expansion of renewables - subsidised to the tune of hundreds of millions of euros - exacerbates this problem.
APG CEO Gerhard Christiner also addressed this problem at a press conference.
Neither the internal market nor renewables are currently able to guarantee security of supply. We have not yet reached that point. As a result of these developments in recent years, we have largely exhausted the capacities in the electricity grid.
Gerhard Christiner Management Board - Austrian Power Grid (APG)
Read more about this in the FORBES article...
In the renowned business magazine FORBES, we also have our say and talk about realistic solutions for avoiding blackouts, which we at World Direct have been working on for years. We believe in the expansion of renewable energy sources and are developing concrete and practicable applications for this, many of which are already in daily use today.
Our IT and energy specialists are focussing on three main areas: