UK power sector must be more ‘outward-looking’

The UK’s power sector should be more outward-looking when it comes to governance and regulation, an industry expert has urged.

Felicity Jones, a partner at renewable and energy storage consultancy Everoze, said the sector too often focuses on what is happening here in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, when there are lessons to be learnt from other parts of the world.

Jones was speaking at an event on energy system innovation and governance hosted by the University of Exeter’s Energy Policy Group earlier this month.

Recounting a visit to a conference in Tunisia, which she described as “humbling”, Jones said she had turned up prepared to speak about how the UK was “leading the way in energy storage. We’ve got a distributed fleet of batteries out there already responding on a second-by-second basis – in the blink of an eye – to frequency response signals.”

She planned to talk about some of the challenges the power sector in the UK is working to address, such as how to integrate batteries alongside other technologies and how to make this work behind the meter.

Upon arriving, Jones said she came across a small side event on East Africa, where one speaker was talking about a landmark deal to install one million solar and storage systems in the region, and another, about how they had already rolled out a new model for behind-the-meter storage because the local utilities were unreliable and slow to act.

“Here I am expecting to preach about what we’re doing in the UK,” she recalled, “realising, actually all the things we’re battling with people are already addressing and solving in totally different parts of the world.”

She added: “The lesson for governance there, is we really need to look outwards. I think maybe too often we look at what’s happening in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe, but how often do we look beyond that, and expand to the periphery of our vision; to things like what’s happening in Kenya and Tanzania and Mozambique, where actually there’s some really step out innovation models already being deployed.

“And it’s not just about geography. It’s also about sectors.”

Jones continued: “From a governance perspective – regulators, policy makers, system operators – do we have those mechanisms for knowledge dissemination?

“Yes, we have a culture of consultation, but often those consultees are still coming from quite a narrow sphere and I’m not sure we’re getting that real injection of fresh ideas.”

Her comments came shortly after Ofgem launched a consultation on its initial proposals for the second round of RIIO price controls.