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The emergence of energy storage and demand-side response measures could bring unintended social and environmental impacts, SP Energy Networks has warned.
The company’s chief executive Frank Mitchell told delegates at Utility Week Congress that the full impact of battery storage technology and demand-side energy management has not been considered.
“It’s not a no consequence option,” he warned.
Battery storage, a burgeoning market, is still “15 years away” from achieving the scale needed to play a vital role in balancing the UK’s demand with its dwindling supply, and when it does reach scale it could have unintended environmental consequences because only 2-4 per cent can be recycled.
Demand-side response meanwhile could lead some companies to realise that it may be more lucrative to be less productive which could lead to widespread job losses and a stifling of industry.
“We need to find affordable long term solutions. And this won’t need a radical departure from the current policy framework,” he told the conference.
Rather Mitchell argues that the government should drive forward its ambitions in terms of energy efficiency, where he says the UK is “only scratching the surface”.
Mitchell’s comments come just one week after Scottish Power boss Keith Anderson told the Financial Times that the UK faces an “energy crisis” in which National Grid would “start going to various industries or large users and saying: at certain times of the year, or at certain days, or at certain times of the day, switch off the energy please, because we don’t have enough”.
Earlier this week ECIU director Richard Black said demand-side response is “really misunderstood” in the UK which can “learn a lot” from the US and Germany, where DSR is used much more widely.
“It almost seems to be regarded as a scandal that you shouldn’t have enough capacity available to make that sort of peak one minute demand that you’re going to get during the year, but if you go down that route you end up with a more expensive system,” he said.
National Grid is in the process of “normalising” its plan to balance the system using demand side measures for the majority of the time by the end of the next decade, but has admitted that some companies have been resistant to the change.
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