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The government has resisted calls to produce an electricity storage strategy, raised in a debate on the Energy Bill.
Liberal Democrat peer Lord Stephen argued for statutory targets and dedicated support for electricity storage technology.
He talked up the benefits of storage for managing intermittent generation, smoothing prices and reducing the overall system cost.
In spite of these benefits, he said: “Electricity storage remains one technology that does not receive support or any form of secure income stream under the Energy Bill proposals.”
Labour peers backed him up. Viscount Hanworth supported storage as an alternative source of flexible generation to open-cycle gas turbines.
He said: “Given that [gas-fired] plant has a significant carbon footprint, it is liable to subvert the virtue of emissions-free renewable generation. For that reason, we ought seriously to consider other options.”
Baroness Worthington said representatives from the industry were “very confused about how to interact with the Department of Energy and Climate Change” as there was no single person with responsibility for electricity storage.
She noted that distribution network operators (DNOs) are going through the price setting process for the next eight years. The government’s proposed capacity mechanism could have “a dramatic effect” on storage, with “a material impact” on DNO strategies, she said. “It seems crazy to be signing off on DNO strategies before the detail of this Bill and the capacity mechanism within it is fully worked through.”
Fellow Labour peer Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan sounded a note of caution, however. He said: “We should not be pushed by every pressure group or commercial interest that comes along with some half-baked bright idea which, with a few million pounds more of public money, will resolve everything.”
Energy minister Baroness Verma said government and Ofgem were backing a number of demonstration projects and feasibility studies.
She sought to reassure the peers “the department is taking this matter very seriously and that there is considerable work in hand without a statutory requirement”.
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