Electric Region Agder
The region that is aiming to go beyond Net Zero by 2030
Electric Region Agder is a project that aims to transform Agder into Norway’s (and perhaps the world’s) first fully electric region by 2030. Since it will continue exporting green electricity to the rest of Norway, mainland Europe and the UK, this would take it beyond net zero to having negative carbon emissions. This would make Agder “carbon negative” – or, confusingly, “carbon positive”, depending on your choice of terminology.1
Most homes and businesses in the county already use green electricity for their heating, hot water, lighting and other appliances. There are also various district heating and cooling networks, which use waste-to-energy for heating and seawater for cooling. The key remaining challenge is therefore to electrify the transport sector and industrial facilities. And upgrading the grid, of course, to cope with the resulting massive increase in demand for power. Can that realistically be done by 2030? And can other regions learn from Agder’s ambitions?
About Agder
Agder is a county in the south of Norway, with a population of just over 300,000 people. Of those, around 86,000 live in the coastal city of Kristiansand, while most of the remaining population also lives along the coast.
The mountainous hinterland is criss-crossed by numerous rivers, which are the source of the bountiful hydroelectric power that should help Agder to achieve its ambition. Kristiansand Municipality already gets roughly 70 percent of its energy from clean electricity, as opposed to less than 50 percent for Norway as a whole.
Benefits of Electrification
Agder sees many benefits to becoming fully electric – beyond the obvious ones of reducing local pollution and combating climate change. For one thing, it will enable the county to use a higher proportion of the renewable energy it produces, instead of buying in fossil fuels. And as electrical systems are more efficient than their fossil fuel-powered counterparts, total energy consumption is likely to fall. In the long run, this should reduce the overall cost of energy.
Once the process of electrification is complete, it will also be possible to eliminate redundant fossil fuel installations. Rather than operating two parallel sets of infrastructure – one for electricity and one for fossil fuels – there will just be the one. This should also help to reduce operation and maintenance costs.
The hope is also that the Electric Region Agder project will help to turn the region into a hub for cleantech companies, attracted by the combination of green power and the opportunity to test and implement new technology and systems.
Grid Upgrades
The biggest challenge will probably be upgrading the region’s transmission and distribution networks to keep up with the growing demand created by electrification. This includes rising numbers of electric cars, buses, trucks and ships, as well as businesses converting industrial processes to run on electricity. Not to forget the new cleantech companies coming to the region, many of which are highly energy-intensive. One recent example is Morrow Batteries, which is building a 42 GWh battery cell factory. That one factory alone will require up to 300 MW of power, or almost 30% of the current peak winter load on Agder’s grid.
The traditional way to upgrade the grid is by building new high-voltage overhead lines and additional substations. That will undoubtedly be necessary, but with demand forecast to more than double, it would be eye-wateringly expensive and environmentally destructive to continue with business as usual. Consequently, the region is implementing a number of projects to make more efficient use of existing infrastructure.
Demand Response and Flexibility
One such project is Norflex, which is experimenting with demand response: encouraging consumers and businesses to be more flexible about when they use electricity, in order to smooth out peaks in demand. When bottlenecks are identified in the grid, a notice is put out on the NODES marketplace, where businesses, consumers and public sector entities can sell “flexibility”. Essentially, they get paid if they choose to limit their consumption at critical times of day.
It is important to stress that this is voluntary: domestic users won’t suddenly find themselves without hot water for their morning shower, and restaurants don’t have to turn off their ovens while their customers are waiting impatiently for their dinner. However, there is an incentive for people to charge their EV in the middle of the night, when demand is low, rather than as soon as they get home from work in the evening.
The NODES marketplace, which has been developed in collaboration with Microsoft, uses machine learning and AI, and in 2018 it won the Innovative Star of Energy Efficiency Award. Introducing new technology of this kind is risky, and at first it may not pay for itself. Some of the cost was therefore funded by the state-backed entity Enova, which is tasked with promoting energy efficiency.
Sustainable Supply Chains
These days, most big businesses and government agencies have an Environment, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) plan, and measure their progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Nevertheless, there is a risk that these plans become a mixture of wishful thinking, hot air and greenwashing, which fails to bring about meaningful and rapid change.
In Agder, they’re trying to overcome that tendency by getting leading businesses and the public sector to set a good example. Not just by implementing sustainable practices at their own organisations, but also by promoting supply chain sustainability. For example, as well as transitioning to electric vehicles (EVs) themselves, they can require their suppliers to use electric heavy machinery on construction sites. Without this kind of impetus, many contractors are reluctant to risk investing in expensive electric equipment to replace the diesel models they are so familiar with. Entities that have committed to promoting sustainable supply chains include the county council and the local energy utility Agder Energi, which are two of the region’s biggest buyers of goods and services.
This can also have important knock-on effects: once suppliers have acquired more sustainable equipment, they start using it in projects for other customers. And once those customers have seen the benefits of quieter, less polluting technology – fewer complaints from local people, for example – they may require it in future contracts.
This kind of virtuous circle – where expectations change, expertise grows, and costs come down – can speed up the transition from early adopters to a mass market.
Incentivising Change
Agder also recognises the need to reduce costs for consumers who are early adopters of green technology. Grants, subsidies and other forms of support are therefore being provided to push people in the desired direction. These grants often have a fixed duration, so people have to act quickly before they run out. This is also in keeping with the region’s long-term goal, which is that new green technologies should be so attractive that they don’t need indefinite subsidies. Help is provided to facilitate the transition, but after that they have to stand on their own two feet.
There is also support for charging infrastructure for EVs, where Agder is still well behind big Norwegian cities like Oslo and Bergen in terms of adoption. Over 70% of new cars sold so far in 2022 have been fully electric, so these efforts are bearing fruit. By 2030, the county council is aiming for the vast majority of public transport to be zero-emission, including both buses and ferries.
Industry-Academia Collaboration
In order to achieve the kind of rapid and radical transformation that Agder is envisaging, you need as many people as possible to pull together. This includes academia, and the University of Agder is contributing in a variety of ways: by prioritising research into renewable energy and EV batteries; by offering courses that give students the skills needed by cleantech companies; and by collaborating with the private and public sectors on various research projects. Other areas where the university is playing a key role include the use of artificial intelligence and modelling future scenarios for the power grid.
In this kind of industry-academia collaboration, the private sector benefits from the university’s expertise in basic research, while the university and its students are given the chance to put theory into practice in commercial projects.
Wider Lessons
Before considering what lessons other regions can learn from Electric Region Agder, I should stress that Agder has important natural advantages, including a small population and very high renewable electricity generation per capita. It is also a wealthy region, with a relatively moderate climate by Norwegian standards. It would therefore be difficult for other regions to do the same.
Nevertheless, I think there are a number of useful lessons to be learned. For one, setting a goal of becoming fully electric by 2030 has established an important reference point. It signals to everyone in society – businesses, local authorities, academia and private individuals – where the region sees its future. People can then make decisions on that basis, for example with respect to how they invest, which products they buy, and which university degree they choose.
Collaboration between the public sector, private sector and academia is also essential, particularly for developing the innovative technology that will help the grid to deal with the increase in demand for electricity. Agder has also recognised that even once new technologies have been developed, it can take some time for them to become financially viable. It has therefore provided subsidies and invested public money to help them overcome that initial hurdle, in order to speed up adoption and create the economies of scale that allow prices to fall.
That is why it is so important for regions like Agder to lead the way: by investing in new technology and experimenting with new market models, it is lowering the adoption costs for other regions without its natural advantages
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https://plana.earth/academy/what-is-difference-between-carbon-neutral-net-zero-climate-positive/