SuperSmart Grid

The SuperSmart Grid (SSG) is a hypothetical wide area electricity network connecting Europe with northern Africa, the Middle East, and the IPS/UPS system of CIS countries.

There are no planned locations for infrastructure or schedule explicitly for the SSG; rather, the name is used to discuss the economic and technological feasibility of such a network and ways in which it might gain political support.

The super grid features would deliver inexpensive, high capacity, low loss transmission, interconnecting producers and consumers of electricity across vast distances.

The SuperSmart Grid would employ high voltage direct current (HVDC) cables in its first-generation implementation to integrate the European electricity market and possibly connect it to neighboring regions, such as North Africa, and their vast renewable energy resources, such as those that could be unlocked by the DESERTEC & Medgrid project.

An initial project proposed in 2006 by Irish wind farm developer Airtricity (Formerly Eirtricity) and Swiss engineering firm ABB would provide a chain of undersea cable connections extending from the Baltic Sea southward to Spain and servicing areas between the endpoints.

A conceptual plan of a European super grid linking renewable energy projects like DESERTEC & Medgrid across North Africa, the Middle East and Europe and could serve as the backbone for the hypothetical supersmart grid.