Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what assessment his Department has made of the effect of effective electricity storage capacity on energy costs.

DECC has identified energy storage as one of the possible balancing mechanisms – alongside other mechanisms, including demand-side response and interconnectors. Different mechanisms are expected to be needed to meet different balancing needs in the transmission and distribution networks, depending on the characteristics they offer, such as their peak power; duration of storage; and response times. The extent of deployment and effect of storage on energy costs will depend on the composition of future electricity systems – both supply and demand – as well as the cost and availability of storage and the other balancing technologies.

Research carried out for the Carbon Trust by Professor Goran Strbac and a team at Imperial College and published in June 2012 in a report titled ‘Role and Value of Energy Storage Systems in the UK Low Carbon Energy Future', concluded that: “energy storage can bring benefits to several sectors in the electricity industry, including generation, transmission and distribution, while providing services to support real-time balancing of demand and supply, network congestion management and reduce the need for investment in system reinforcement”. The Imperial College report estimated that in a “2050 high renewables scenario, application of energy storage technologies could potentially generate total system savings of £10bn/year”.

The Low Carbon Innovation Coordination Group, which includes the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the other major public-sector investors in low carbon technology innovation, published a Strategic Framework in February 2014 which concluded that successful innovation in electricity storage technologies could save the UK energy system about £4.6billion in total by 2050.