Dii’s long term rollout plan
Three questions to Dr. Aglaia Wieland,
responsible for the long term Rollout Plan at Dii
Dr. Aglaia Wieland is part of Dii's Management Board and is responsible for strategy development and the long term Rollout Plan. Before joining Dii two years ago as Senior Strategy Director, Ms. Wieland worked as a Principal at The Boston Consulting Group in Germany and the Middle East. Her international experience includes projects in industrial goods and renewable energy, growth and internationalization strategies.
Ms. Wieland, how does Dii aim to reach the target of covering a substantial part of local and European electricity demand with renewable energy from the deserts?
First of all our objective is to be an enabler of this development. We are developing a implementation roadmap that will guide investment and funding for renewable energies from the deserts in the coming 40 years. This rollout plan, as it is called, will indicate a pathway to the fastest possible integration of renewable energies into the market without reliance on subsidies. How the production and transmission volumes are likely to develop over time depends on many factors, primarily the infrastructure which is already in place or needs to be expanded, as well as the difference between production costs and market prices. We are estimating that market parity for renewable energy from North African and the Middle Eastern deserts could be reached between 2020 and 2025.
What shape will this rollout plan take?
Basically we are analyzing how the energy systems in EUMENA could be shaped by 2050. In order to structure the discussion, we have chosen to look into all major generation technologies that are available today and the cost for their development. Furthermore, we are analyzing different scenarios of power exchange options between MENA and Europe, as well as electricity interconnection capacity between countries. We are also taking external factors such as demand development, fuel availability and political priorities of the different nations involved into consideration. We then identify specific phases until 2050 with specific recommendations for the involved stakeholders: we see the “reference project phase” up until 2020 with low project volumes and high attention to outstanding pilot projects that are likely to attract political support and access to public money. Following this we envisage a “scale-up phase” with higher project volumes and a higher cumulative burden on international donors. Lessons learned from the first phase might result in policy revisions. Investments in transmission infrastructure have to be stimulated. From 2030/2035 onwards we expect the market for renewable energy from the deserts to be self-sustaining. By this time, technologies should be mature and cost-competitive, and support can be phased out. We aim to develop highly actionable and specific recommendations for each phase.
How does Dii come to these conclusions?
Dii is organized into five working groups which deal with generation technologies and their development, transmission and grid questions, market and financing related topics, the integrated EUMENA electricity system and socio-economic aspects of the Desertec vision. Within the working groups, Dii staff, together with representatives of shareholders and associated partners combine their knowledge - from operational expertise to scientific analysis - and come up with robust results. The working groups exchange their findings with the steering boards which are responsible for the three Dii objectives until 2012, the rollout plan, the regulatory concept and the reference projects. This leads to the unique situation that Dii can present insight and scenarios which have been developed, discussed and revised by both the scientific community and expert practitioners.
