Storage in the spotlight

The new National Infrastructure Commission is a timely response to energy storage market barriers says David Holmes, managing director at Quarry Battery Company.

The creation of a National Infrastructure Commission with a remit, among other essentials, to look at how large scale energy storage can be encouraged should come as a welcome breath of fresh air, not just to the energy sector but also to construction, to communities, businesses and households.

If the UK does build more grid-scale storage as we at QBC have long been arguing that it must, then the benefits of such a programme will be far-reaching and profound.

Until now the UK’s decarbonisation programme has amounted to only half a plan. We have been building out intermittent renewables at a remarkable rate, and closing fossil-fuelled generation plant. What has been missing – the other half of the plan – is the construction of new grid-scale storage to capture excess renewable, then release it at times when the wind fails to blow or the sun to shine.

While other countries have not made such an elementary mistake and have been partnering renewables with new storage, the UK’s last grid-scale storage facility was built over 30 years ago. As a result we now have some catching up to do. The consequences of continuing to do nothing are a grid that is increasingly volatile and at risk of blackouts, and continually rising constraint payments that Imperial College London estimates could hit £2.7bn a year by 2020.

In a joint article with Professor Phil Taylor of Newcastle University here in Utility Week on September 18 we showed how the UK’s grid-scale renewables require a grid-scale storage response in the order of some 10GW/50GWhs – and only pumped hydro storage has the ability to deliver that kind of grunt and staying power.

The sites for such storage exist, as a UK-wide survey, partly funded by the Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc), has shown. If the UK’s investors, developers and construction companies are given the go-ahead, then the starting gun will have been fired on a £16bn programme that will support over 50,000 construction jobs for years ahead and bring strong economic stimulus to dozens of communities throughout the UK.

The new storage facilities will last for 125 years or more, each of them directly supporting from dozens to hundreds of full time operational jobs depending upon their size, as well as boosting local suppliers with their need for services and support.

Nationally, a new 10GW/50GWh fleet of pumped hydro will cut the cost of decarbonising the grid by around £3.5 bn a year, save an additional 5 million tones of carbon emissions and make the grid more secure and stable without more reliance on energy imports via interconnectors, and oil and gas.

Storage currently faces multiple barriers – some to do with the way the energy market fails to fairly reward it for its remarkable contributions to energy security and efficiency, and others related to the way it is treated by the planning system. A team within Decc is now identifying those barriers and looking at whether and how they might be removed.

Their work could not be more timely.