Long-duration Energy Storage (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Baroness Northover Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I too pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, for her leadership of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, of which I am a member, her expert chairing of this inquiry and her compelling introduction to the debate. She brings great expertise to the committee and has an ability to horizon scan in a way that has been vital to the committee. She will be missed as our chair as her term comes to what feels like a premature end. I also thank the staff members who supported this inquiry, in particular Thomas Hornigold, our policy analyst, whose clarity and brilliance were an enormous help to us and certainly to me.

I too look forward to the Minister’s maiden speech. As Minister of State for Investment, she has a key responsibility in this area. Is she already looking at it? I am extremely glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is alongside her on the Front Bench. Both have a track record of delivering.

The noble Lord, Lord Drayson, is right to emphasise that this is not an area for hesitation or delay. As he put it, consultation and review are not what is required here; it is action. Indeed, the greatest risk is, as he said, indecision. Does the Minister agree? The noble Lord, Lord Wei, pointed to the Vaccine Taskforce as a model for how this might be taken forward. What does she think about that model?

As others have mentioned, we need only to look at what is happening in Los Angeles or at the floods in Manchester over Christmas to remind ourselves of the greater extremes in weather that we are experiencing and the urgent necessity to address climate change. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, who I am glad to see is just returning to his place, has flagged cost-benefit, but I wonder what the financial cost of rebuilding Los Angeles will be, let alone the human cost.

It is very welcome that the Government have brought forward plans to reach net zero. This requires huge scaling up of renewables and major changes to the grid and to planning regulations. As the economy moves away from fossil fuels and to greater consumption of electricity generated renewably, there are, of course, major challenges. As other noble Lords have said, a major challenge is, if you anticipate huge demands for electricity, what you do when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining, potentially in the European winter—the Dunkelflaute to which people have referred.

Therefore, there is a need to store energy for those times. As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said, that is a no-brainer, and that is agreed. It is a matter not of short-term battery storage but, as the title of the report says, of long-duration energy storage. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, said, this issue has become even more urgent because of the change of Government and the welcome determination to decarbonise the economy earlier than the previous Government aimed to do.

The Royal Society made a thorough investigation of long-duration energy storage and reported, but seemingly with little traction. It also fed into our deliberations. Like the Royal Society, the conclusions we reached were that the best option is hydrogen storage and that the UK is well suited for this with salt caverns that could be used for this purpose. Given that potential UK capacity, energy could be exported at time of need to the continent. Therefore, does the Minister recognise this as an important economic opportunity? This also means that, when there is overproduction from renewables, it could be stored as opposed to being switched off or wasted. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, said, to build such storage could take up to a decade and would need capital investment up front because of the delayed and unpredictable nature of the return on this investment. The noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, is right about the urgency of public education and engagement on this.

Relying on fossil fuel back-up in the short term, as the Government seem to be emphasising, has its risks. Clearly, this is not environmentally friendly, and the point at which such back-up is required could well be when others too are seeking such assistance, and prices are likely to be high. In addition, it potentially means that any excess renewable energy cannot be stored, and the gas plants may need subsidies to keep going, as they are not likely to be fully used since they are intended to fill gaps.

Our report laid out what we heard about the need for planning our energy needs, the necessary infrastructure to be built and planning reforms to be taken forward. I look forward to the Minister’s response on these. As many speakers have said, given the scale of what is required, are the Government seizing this responsibility and, if so, how?

If the hydrogen storage proposed in this paper seems an expensive route to go down—one or two noble Lords mentioned that—then it is worth noting, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, said, that the Government spent almost £80 billion on support for energy bills after the invasion of Ukraine and the shock increase in energy prices. Even then citizens faced high bills, and they still are. That was not, of course, just in the UK. We need only to look to the destabilising effect of the invasion of Ukraine, the sudden and huge increase in gas prices that followed that, the pressures on the cost of living and the economic, social and political fallout of that. The rise of populist and nationalist parties across the world owes much to that cost of living increase.

The first duty of a Government is to keep citizens secure. The noble Lord, Lord Rees, is right to emphasise risk, including from technological breakdown and malign attacks, but that is the significance of the security of energy supply that we are addressing in this paper. The Minister has our report. I hope we will hear substantial answers today—the potential actions of a CEO. That is why this Government have brought some wonderful experts into ministerial positions, including the noble Baroness herself and, of course, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance. If she does not yet have the necessary answers in her brief, I hope she will go back to her new department with her new responsibilities and make sure that planning for long-duration energy storage is urgently taken forward. In other words: get on with it.