Mart van der Meijden on innovation

"We must innovate more quickly"

Innovation involves far more than just the latest technology. Grid managers must keep up to date on all fronts, whether it be physical infrastructure, international cooperation or funding arrangements. Mart van der Meijden is TenneT's Innovation Manager. "We have now professionalized our innovation activities," he reports.

If there is any market which has been particularly dynamic in recent years, it is the energy market. There has been a process of liberalisation throughout Europe, leading to inevitable changes. Partly due to Al Gore's efforts, more people have come to realise the urgency of taking action on the sustainability front. "TenneT faced a further challenge as new production suddenly peaked and we had to build new infrastructure much earlier than planned," recalls Van der Meijden. "We therefore had to step up the pace of innovation."

In order to bring new ideas to maturity more quickly, TenneT restructured its innovation activities, whereupon Van der Meijden was appointed coordinator of a new 'innovation support team'. "The team includes a programme manager from each business unit," he explains. "These managers encourage staff to come up with new ideas, and try to give those ideas a chance. This really is a 'bottom-up' process, with many suggestions coming from the work floor. We are not an academic group; we like to get our hands dirty!"

TenneT pursues innovation in four main areas. The first is the transition to more sustainable energy sources. Ideas include a plan for a 'wall socket at sea' which would connect offshore wind production with the landside grid, with enhanced flexibility by means of electricity storage, either local or international. The second main area is environment, health and safety, in which TenneT's innovations include the 'Wintrack' pylon with its particularly low magnetic field. The third area is quality and security of supply. The Netherlands enjoys a particularly strong reputation in this regard, not least due to its use of very long underground 380 kV cables. The length of those cables is limited by the risks to voltage stability and the security of supply. Two of the country's Universities of Technology - Delft and Eindhoven - are researching ways to overcome the inherent problems. The fourth area is efficiency and efficacy, which will soon become particularly important, Van der Meijden believes. "We wish to utilise the grids as efficiently as possible using a number of new systems such as 'flow-based allocation'. This helps to coordinate supply and demand between countries, further to the integration of the market. The increase in exports and imports, and the resulting fluctuations, have changed everything."

Many of Van der Meijden's examples involve a form of systems innovation. "The system-based approach is becoming increasingly important, as amply illustrated by the energy storage studies we have conducted. It is not so much a question of which solution will work, but which combination of solutions will work best. This is TenneT's real strength: the ability to think in terms of the system as a whole rather than a series of isolated solutions."

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