Leader: Pull out all the stops for electricity storage

It’s been an incredible couple of weeks for the energy sector’s pet technology: energy storage. The uptick in investment announcements, strategic partnership agreements and product launches has been truly remarkable and reflects a growing community, including high net worth “angels”, entrepreneurs and technology behemoths who are increasingly willing to place bets on energy storage playing a significant role in our future energy system – a much bigger and more varied role than many industry experts might have predicted even a short year ago, and certainly much sooner than most would have guessed.

But it’s not quite plane sailing yet. Widely recognised barriers to cost-effective operation of energy storage still exist, and policymakers and the regulator must move swiftly, not only to address them, but to do so in a way that co-ordinates with other changes and demands on an increasingly complex and dynamic energy system. Failing to do so could turn today’s investment and demonstration zeal into a bubble, which will either gradually deflate of burst, damaging companies and denying the energy system a tool it badly needs in order to achieve decarbonisation in a secure and sustainable way.

Progress is, happily, being made to address barriers to the deployment of energy storage. A Decc-Ofgem consultation on this is ongoing and due to come up with a list of proposed changes in the spring of 2017. Once this is done, the next and more challenging step will be enacting those proposed changes with alacrity.

What is less easy to identify is the extent to which the consultation is looking sideways, to make sure that its improved mechanisms for ownership and operation of storage will mesh with the evolution of the aggregator market, demand-side solutions, peer-to-peer energy trading and the uptake of electric vehicles, for instance.

Lack of co-ordination and clarity on how these ­interdependent elements fit together will only lead to market forces creating unwieldy work-arounds, which would be both inefficient and opaque – not ideal at a time when the energy market is already struggling to be more transparent.

One key resource that could help Decc and Ofgem face up to this challenge is the Future Power System Architecture report, which is now awaiting publication.