Europe’s need for green electricity is blowing fuses

DELFT UNIVERSITY’S Electrical Sustainable Power Lab occupies a 25-metre-tall peak-roofed shed, a cross between a hayloft and an aeroplane hangar, not far from where Vermeer painted his celebrated view of the city. The inside has a Frankenstein feel: arrays of corona rings on poles, a multistorey stack of power cells that can simulate lightning. The supercomputer is upstairs, inside a Faraday cage that insulates it from magnetic fields (a wise precaution when there is mock lightning about). But the most unusual thing at the lab is the software running on that supercomputer: a virtual model of a high-voltage electric grid, with all of its power plants, transmission lines and substations.

The model, one of the most sophisticated in Europe, is known as a “digital twin”. “For 150 years electrical engineers were trying to predict grid responses using differential equations,” says Peter Palensky, the lab’s head. Now they can experiment with a mock-up based on real-world data. An unexpected change can ripple out and cause a blackout, as happened in 2022 when Russian hackers inserted malware into circuit-breakers in Ukraine, or last April when frequency disturbances crashed the grids in Spain and Portugal.

Photograph: Marieke de Lorijn