Government urged to power up support for giant batteries

The UK will be at increased risk of power blackouts if it does not increase investment in energy storage technologies, including emerging battery systems capable of storing megawatts of power.

That is the stark warning from the international Electricity Storage Association (ESA), which said last week that the UK and Irish governments need to deliver a huge increase in energy storage capacity if they are to meet EU targets requiring them to generate around 50GW from renewable sources by 2020.

Delegates at a meeting of the ESA in London last week said that while the UK government had introduced wide-reaching incentive schemes to encourage the development of renewables, there were no such incentives in place to promote the storage technologies necessary to make wind farms and other variable energy sources technically feasible.

"The fact is we will have a very different generation mix in place in 10 years' time, but while there is focus on building renewables capacity there is not the focus on the reserve storage network you need to support it," said Anthony Price, managing director of energy storage consultancy Swanbarton and a member of the ESA. " Currently, energy shortfalls are made up by fast-acting plants such as gas turbine or diesel generators, but they all have a carbon impact and if the government is serious about emissions it will have to look at alternatives."

Pumped hydro-electic plants currently offer the UK's main form of low-carbon energy storage, but according to Price there are few suitable sites left that can be exploited and as such there is an urgent need to demonstrate alternative approaches such as batteries, flywheels and compressed air storage systems.

"We are working with a company called NGK that has installed a 34MW sodium sulphur battery at a wind farm in Japan," he said. "That is the scale of storage that can now be done... but in the UK the split market structure means that it is unclear whether the energy generator, supplier or grid company should pay for these types of storage systems."

He argued that the only way to unblock this log jam is for the government to provide a clear incentive for firms to invest in storage capacity at a level similar to the subsidies offered through the Renewables Obligation scheme.

"The government has ploughed billions into hydrogen research for relatively little return," complained Price. "It would be better served offering support for technologies we know work and are necessary."